Getty is new owner of Watkins’ Yosemite photo

Weston Naef, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, once described Carleton Watkins’ 1878 trip into Yosemite as a “watershed,” both for Watkins’ own growth as an artist and for the then-youthful history of landscape photography.

The star of the April 28 sale of the Gordon L. Bennett collection at Sotheby’s New York showroom was a knockout Watkins photograph of Agassiz Rock, shown as a looming black form against a distant vista of Yosemite falls. The monolithic rock formation was named for the Swiss physician and naturalist Louis Agassiz, who was instrumental in the early development of American pragmatist philosophy during a teaching stint at Harvard.

Watkins’ mammoth-plate photograph sold for $310,400 -- more than twice its high estimate and five times the average price of his 33 photographs in the sale.

Now it turns out the unannounced buyer was the Getty: Watkins’ great image has been quietly slipped into Naef’s current exhibition, “Photographers of Genius,” celebrating the 20th anniversary of the museum’s inauguration of a photography department.

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-- Christopher Knight