Around 1900, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright took and printed a series of photographs for an album showing the Hillside Home School run by his aunt in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The source of Wright’s inspiration for these photographs lay in the natural forms and simple beauty of the landscapes surrounding the area.

Each print was executed in a small panoramic format (10 × 24.5 cm) and titled in Wright’s hand. When placed side-by-side, the three first images (“N.W,” “Down the Valley,” and “Bryn Mawr”) constitute a panorama of the Jones Valley looking north. The two other images (“Whittier Hill” and “Skating Pond, Snow Covered”) depict the future site of Taliesin, the home, school, and studio the architect began to establish in 1911 on farmland that his family had settled in this area of Wisconsin.

Wright’s lifelong fascination with this site is evoked in this series of collotypes recording Taliesin in winter. Wright’s achievement was to render the aesthetic qualities of this process by subtle tonal values. The collotype, a kind of photolithograph in which glass replaces stone in the printing process, represents the finest method of photomechanical reproduction made from a photographic image. Wright used the technique to flatten the perspective and reduce contrast in order to emulate the Japanese print. Wright’s use of the panoramic format shows his interest in horizontality, especially evident in his treatment of space in his ‘’Prairie Style’’ houses of the first decade, so called because of their long, low, earth-hugging proportions.

Only one other copy of this group of prints is known to date. It complements the two other photographs by Wright in the CCA Collection (“Weeds Studies,” published in The House Beautiful), which he made at the same time and in the same landscape.