In his 1967 autobiography, William Zorach wrote of a summer trip to Yosemite in 1920, vividly recalling the place even after more than four decades:
Every now and then in life we have an experience that moves us so deeply, that holds us with such sheer, transcendent beauty, that it takes us completely out of this world…. [for me, that] vision was the Yosemite. Never had I dreamed of such awe-inspiring magnitude, such beauty and grandeur of forms. The tremendous waterfalls dropping from the blue sky thousands of feet into the valley, the domes and mountains of granite, the silent lakes, the rushing streams, the giant sequoias with their delicate fern-like needles and tremendous slabs of bark…. This was the garden of Eden, God’s paradise. I sketched and painted in ecstasy.

That summer Zorach befriended eighteen-year-old Ansel Adams, who was working as custodian of the Sierra Club headquarters. They climbed some of Yosemite’s most challenging peaks, carrying Zorach’s sketching supplies and a camera for Adams, though he was not yet an accomplished photographer. Both were inspired to record the beauty and abstract forms of the park’s cascading falls—Zorach created quick calligraphic pencil sketches and delicate watercolors painted in opalescent tones, while Adams rendered the falls in black, white, and gray. Although this trip was a brief interlude in Zorach’s long career, Adams returned to his “home place” of Yosemite virtually every year, photographing its waterfalls in all seasons.

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