The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak

Last updated

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
Albert Bierstadt - The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak.jpg
Artist Albert Bierstadt
Year1863
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions186.7 cm× 306.7 cm(73.5 in× 120.75 in)
Location Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is an 1863 landscape oil painting by the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt. It is based on sketches made during Bierstadt's travels with Frederick W. Lander's Honey Road Survey Party in 1859. The painting shows Lander's Peak in the Wyoming Range of the Rocky Mountains, with an encampment of Native Americans in the foreground. It has been compared to, and exhibited with, The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church. Lander's Peak immediately became a critical and popular success and sold in 1865 for $25,000.

Contents

Background

Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was born in Germany, and, though his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two, he spent many of his formative years in Europe. [1] He made his debut in an 1858 exhibition, but his breakthrough came in the aftermath of a journey he made the following year. In the spring of 1859, Bierstadt joined the Honey Road Survey Party led by then-colonel Frederick W. Lander. [2] Bierstadt traveled as far as the Wyoming Range in the Rocky Mountains and made studies for numerous paintings along the way. [3] Bierstadt was greatly impressed by the landscape he encountered and described the Rocky Mountains as "the best material for the artist in the world." [4] Bierstadt habitually extensively prepared for his work, making as many as fifty sketches for a single painting. [5] In 1860, he exhibited Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak at the National Academy of Design. [1] His greatest success, however, came with The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, which he exhibited in 1863 at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he also had a studio. [6]

Composition and theme

The painting shows Lander's Peak, a mountain with a summit of 10,456 feet (3,187 m) in the Wyoming Range in modern-day Wyoming. The peak was named after Frederick W. Lander on Bierstadt's initiative, after Lander's death in the Civil War. [7] In one description of the painting, "Sharply pointed granite peaks and fantastically illuminated clouds float above a tranquil, wooded genre scene." [8] The foreground is dominated by the campsite of a tribe of Native Americans. The landscape in the painting is not the actual landscape as it appears at Lander's Peak but rather an ideal landscape based on nature, altered by Bierstadt for dramatic effect. [4]

Bierstadt's painting hit a nerve with contemporary Americans by portraying the grandeur and pristine beauty of the nation's western wilderness. It was a reference to the idea of Manifest Destiny, where the Rocky Mountains represented both natural beauty and an obstacle to westward expansion. [9] In the words of historian Anne F. Hyde: "Bierstadt painted the West as Americans hoped it would be, which made his paintings vastly popular and reinforced the perception of the West as either Europe or sublime Eden." [8] At the same time, the Native Americans in the foreground gave the scene authenticity and presented it as a timeless place, untouched by European hands. [10]

Depiction of Shoshone Peoples

Bierstadt paints a band of Shoshone Native peoples at the forefront of the painting. [11] According to a review in Harper's Weekly from March 26, 1864, Lander's Peak "is purely an American scene, and from the faithful and elaborate delineation of the Indian village, a form of life now rapidly disappearing from the earth, may be called a historic landscape." [12] Bierstadt illustrated Shoshone people along with the majestic peaks as a marker of the "sublime" which authors like James Fenimore Cooper, John C. Frémont, and Washington Irving wrote about. [1] Bierstadt does not include who these people are in his painting title. Unlike Catlin, Bierstadt did not focus on the individuality of members of the Shoshone people. Rather, his focus was on their relationship with the landscape. As Bierstadt scholar Matthew Biagell suggests, "He placed them, as he placed European peasants in earlier works, in the middle distance so that we witness their presence in a landscape setting rather than focus on their movements." [13]

In 1859, Eastern Shoshone peoples lived in the region now called Western Wyoming. [14] Bierstadt commented on the Shoshone people he saw in a letter from July 10, 1859, which The Crayon, an art magazine, published in September 1859. [15] "The manners and customs of the Indians are still as they were hundreds of years ago, and now is the time to paint them, for they are rapidly passing away, and soon will be known only in history. I think that the artist ought to tell his portion of their history as well as the writer; a combination of both will assuredly render it more complete" [15] Bierstadt adds, "We have a great many Indian subjects. We were quite fortunate in getting them, the natives not being very willing to have the brass tube pointed at them. Of course they were astonished when we showed them the pictures they did not sit for; and the best we have taken have been obtained without the knowledge of the parties, which is, in fact the best way to take any portrait" [15] The Shoshone people are depicted on a similar level as the nature of the image. Bierstadt is attempting to capture an image of them and the Rockies, something which he believes must be preserved as a part of history.

Reception

Lander's Peak has often been compared to Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the Andes Church Heart of the Andes.jpg
Lander's Peak has often been compared to Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the Andes

Lander's Peak was an immediate success; twelve hundred people were invited to the exhibition, and almost a thousand showed up. [6] Bierstadt was a shrewd self-promoter and a gifted artist, and this was the first of his paintings to be widely promoted with a single-picture exhibition accompanied by a pamphlet, engravings, and a tour. [16] The painting, with its ten-foot width, was intended both for exhibition halls and the homes of America's emergent millionaire class. [17] In 1865, British railway entrepreneur James McHenry purchased the work for $25,000, [9] the most paid for an American painting to that point. [18] Bierstadt later repurchased it, and gave or sold it to his brother Edward, before it was eventually acquired for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1907. [7]

Comparisons were made between Lander's Peak and The Heart of the Andes , a contemporary painting by one of Bierstadt's main rivals in the landscape genre, Frederic Edwin Church. [1] The two works represented the two great mountain ranges spanning North and South America. At the New York Metropolitan Fair in 1864, held by the United States Sanitary Commission to raise money for the Union war effort, the two paintings were exhibited opposite each other. [19] Lander's Peak and The Heart of the Andes are still exhibited on opposite walls at their current location at the Metropolitan. [20]

Most reviews of the painting were positive; one review called it "beyond question one of the finest landscapes ever painted in this country", adding, "Its artistic merits are in some respects unrivaled: and added to these it has the advantage of being a representative painting of a portion of the most sublime and beautiful scenery on the American Continent." [21] The painting won a prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. [9] At the same time, there were also critical voices; in particular, some American Pre-Raphaelites found his brushwork wanting. One such critic complained that it would have been better "if the marks of the brush had, by dexterous handling, been made to stand for scrap and fissure, crag and cranny, but as it is, we have only too little geology and too much bristle." [22]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Anderson, Nancy. "Bierstadt, Albert". Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Retrieved April 17, 2011.
  2. ↑ Hendricks (1964), pp. 333–9.
  3. ↑ Hendricks (1964), p. 338.
  4. 1 2 Hine & Faragher (2007), p. 196.
  5. ↑ Mayer & Myers (1999), p. 61.
  6. 1 2 Houston & Houston (1999), p. 69.
  7. 1 2 "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863". metmuseum.org.
  8. 1 2 Hyde (1993), p. 368.
  9. 1 2 3 Facos (2011), p. 138.
  10. ↑ Miller (2001), pp. 46–7.
  11. ↑ McKay, Mary Terence. "For Bierstadt's Eyes Alone". Traditional Fine Arts Organization. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  12. ↑ Nancy K. Anderson; Linda S. Ferber; Helena Wright (1990). Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (First ed.). New York: Hudson Hills Press/Brooklyn Museum. ISBN   1-55595-059-0. OCLC   21875508.
  13. ↑ Biagell, Matthew. "Albert Bierstadt". Traditional Fine Arts Organization. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  14. ↑ "Wyoming Indian Tribes and Languages". www.native-languages.org. Retrieved December 11, 2017.
  15. 1 2 3 B.; B. E. N. (1859). "Sketchings". The Crayon. 6 (9): 280–289. doi:10.2307/25527949. JSTOR   25527949.
  16. ↑ Wolf (1992), pp. 433–4.
  17. ↑ Wolf (1992), p. 434.
  18. ↑ Wallach, Alan (2018). "Aestheticizing Tendencies in Hudson River School Landscape Painting at the Beginning of the Gilded Age". In Laster, Margaret R.; Bruner, Chelsea (eds.). New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-351-02756-4.
  19. ↑ Miller (2001), p. 46.
  20. ↑ Houston & Houston (1999), p. 70.
  21. ↑ Houston & Houston (1999), pp. 69–70.
  22. ↑ Mayer & Myers (1999), p. 62.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Bierstadt</span> German-American landscape painter (1830–1902)

Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Moran</span> 19th and 20th-century American artist

Thomas Moran was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist. He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio. A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly. During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as one of the premier painters of the American landscape, in particular, the American West.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mount Bierstadt</span> Mountain in Colorado, United States

Mount Bierstadt is a 14,065-foot-high (4,287 m) mountain summit in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the U.S. state of Colorado. The fourteener is located in the Mount Evans Wilderness of Pike National Forest, 9.4 miles (15.1 km) south by east of the Town of Georgetown in Clear Creek County. It was named in honor of Albert Bierstadt, an American landscape painter who made the first recorded summit of the mountain in 1863.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James McDougal Hart</span> British-American painter

James McDougal Hart, was a Scottish-born American landscape and cattle painter of the Hudson River School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Johnson Heade</span> American painter (1819–1904)

Martin Johnson Heade was an American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, and depictions of tropical birds, as well as lotus blossoms and other still lifes. His painting style and subject matter, while derived from the romanticism of the time, are regarded by art historians as a significant departure from those of his peers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Trost Richards</span> American landscape painter (1833–1905)

William Trost Richards was an American landscape artist. He was associated with both the Hudson River School and the American Pre-Raphaelite movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sanford Robinson Gifford</span> American painter (1823–1880)

Sanford Robinson Gifford was an American landscape painter and a leading member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists. A highly-regarded practitioner of Luminism, his work was noted for its emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Worthington Whittredge</span> American painter

Thomas Worthington Whittredge was an American artist of the Hudson River School. Whittredge was a highly regarded artist of his time, and was friends with several leading Hudson River School artists including Albert Bierstadt and Sanford Robinson Gifford. He traveled widely and excelled at landscape painting, many examples of which are now in major museums. He served as president of the National Academy of Design from 1874 to 1875 and was a member of the selection committees for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and the 1878 Paris Exposition, both important venues for artists of the day.

<i>The Heart of the Andes</i> Painting by Frederic Edwin Church

The Heart of the Andes is a large oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the American artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). It depicts an idealized landscape in the South American Andes, where Church traveled on two occasions. Measuring more than five feet high and almost ten feet wide, its New York City exhibition in 1859 was a sensation, establishing Church as the foremost landscape painter in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lander Peak</span> Mountain in the state of Wyoming

In 1859 Albert Bierstadt accompanied Frederick W. Lander on a western expedition. On his return he painted a mountain landscape on a large 6-by-10-foot (1.8-by-3.0-meter) canvas, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak. Following the death of General Lander during the Civil War in 1862, Bierstadt named the peak Lander's Peak. The painting was completed in 1863 and sold in 1865 for $25,000.

<i>A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie</i> 1866 oil painting by Albert Bierstadt

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie is an 1866 landscape oil painting by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) which was inspired by sketches created on an 1863 expedition.

<i>The Icebergs</i> Painting by Frederic Edwin Church

The Icebergs is an 1861 oil painting by the American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church. It was inspired by his 1859 voyage to the North Atlantic around Newfoundland and Labrador. Considered one of Church's "Great Pictures"—measuring 1.64 by 2.85 metres —the painting depicts one or more icebergs in the afternoon light of the Arctic. It was first displayed in New York City in 1861, where visitors paid 25 cents' admittance to the one-painting show. Similar exhibitions in Boston and London followed. The unconventional landscape of ice, water, and sky generally drew praise, but the American Civil War, which began the same year, lessened critical and popular interest in New York City's cultural events.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bierstadt Lake</span> Lake in Colorado, United States

Bierstadt Lake is located in Larimer County, Colorado and within the Rocky Mountain National Park. Near McHenrys Peak and Longs Peak, there are "spectacular views" of the Continental Divide at the lake. The Bierstadt Lake Trailhead is located about 6.5 miles (10.5 km) from the turn-off at U.S. Route 36 into the Rocky Mountain National Park. During the summer, shuttle buses provide transportation to the trailhead.

History of Rocky Mountain National Park began when Paleo-Indians traveled along what is now Trail Ridge Road to hunt and forage for food. Ute and Arapaho people subsequently hunted and camped in the area. In 1820, the Long Expedition, led by Stephen H. Long for whom Longs Peak was named, approached the Rockies via the Platte River. Settlers began arriving in the mid-1800s, displacing the Native Americans who mostly left the area voluntarily by 1860, while others were removed to reservations by 1878.

<i>Valley of the Yosemite</i> 1864 oil painting by Albert Bierstadt

Valley of the Yosemite is a painting by the German American painter Albert Bierstadt that was completed in 1864. Initially associated with the Hudson River School, Bierstadt rose to prominence for his paintings of the Rocky Mountains, which established him as one of the best painters of the western American landscape. His later paintings of Yosemite were also received with critical acclaim and public praise.

<i>Among the Sierra Nevada, California</i> 1868 painting by Albert Bierstadt

Among the Sierra Nevada, California is an 1868 oil-on-canvas painting by German-American artist Albert Bierstadt which depicts a landscape scene of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Created at his studio in Rome, the painting was exhibited throughout Europe, creating interest in immigration to the United States. Measuring 72 by 120+1⁄8 inches, the painting is a centerpiece of the 19th-century landscape collection at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

<i>The Three Tetons</i> Painting by Thomas Moran

The Three Tetons is an 1895 oil painting by Thomas Moran. It depicts Grand Teton and the neighbouring peaks of Middle Teton and South Teton, from the Idaho side. The National Park Service describes Moran as, after Albert Bierstadt, the "other 'grand' painter of the Tetons".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Pre-Raphaelites</span> 19th-century realist painting movement

The American Pre-Raphaelites was a movement of landscape painters in the United States during the mid-19th century. It was named for its connection to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and for the influence of John Ruskin on its members. Painter Thomas Charles Farrer led the movement, and many members were active abolitionists. Their work together was short-lived, and the movement had mostly dissolved by 1870.

Hermann Traugott Louis Fuechsel, also known as Füchsel or Fuchsel, was a German-American landscape painter, and member of the Düsseldorf school and Hudson River School.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.