Carleton Watkins: Making the West American includes  reproductions of 76 artworks. This website features about 450 images that didn’t fit in the book, including work by Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Alexander Gardner, William Keith and more.

Every artwork mentioned in the book that is available to be published digitally is included by chapter via the menu above. (Carleton Watkins made thousands of pictures over the course of his career; many are not available digitally.) If and when additional images become available, I’ll add them to the relevant chapter page(s), and I’ll note their inclusion via a change log here.

Faced with two potential confusions, I’ve generally presented images here with the dating used by the collecting institution. In rare cases, this is different from when I believe the picture was made (as reflected by the text of the book). To see more Watkinses, mostly stereographs, see carletonwatkins.org.

Thanks especially to the many Watkins-holding institutions with open-content policies, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Stanford University Libraries, the California State Library, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and more.