A group of giant sequoias identified as standing 270 feet high in the Mariposa Grove is recorded in this albumen print boudoir card by Isaiah West Taber of San Francisco, numbered B 777 in his Pacific Coast view series, circa 1880 to 1895. A man rests seated at the base of the central trees with a packed mule standing beside him, providing vivid human scale against the immense trunks that fill the frame from ground to upper edge. The title, series number, and photographer's credit are printed in the negative along the lower edge of the image, and the reverse bears Taber's full studio imprint for his Photographic Parlors at 8 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.
Four sequoia trunks of extraordinary girth occupy the foreground, their deeply furrowed reddish bark rendered in sharp detail; the grove floor is carpeted with duff and fallen branches, and smaller conifers recede into a luminous background between the trunks. The seated figure and mule are dwarfed entirely by the root bases of the nearest trees, making the scale of the sequoias immediately legible to any viewer.
Taber's Mariposa Grove series, produced largely from negatives acquired from Carleton Watkins following the latter's bankruptcy in 1881, was among the most widely distributed commercial photographic documentation of the California Big Trees, sold to tourists traveling the region by rail and distributed through Taber's San Francisco View Department, which advertised the best and largest collection of Pacific Coast views available.
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