Prints and Authors in the Time of Manet

Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods

Albumen silver print, about 1880
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1993.71

William Henry Jackson was born in Keeseville, New York, near Lake Champlain in the northeast corner of the state. He was trained as a painter and began working as a retoucher and assistant for area photo galleries. After serving in the Civil War, he travelled west, opening a photography studio in Omaha, Nebraska in 1867. He began making grand landscapes of the western Rockies, especially the Yellowstone region and Colorado, for Francis V. Hayden’s Geological Survey of the Territories in 1870. Jackson’s images of Yellowstone are said to have inspired President Ulysses Grant to create the first national park in 1872.
Jackson’s work in the Rockies drew him further west and he established a second studio in Denver in 1879.