ACCESS ART
ART CONNECTIONS
19TH CENTURY AMERICA
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ACCESS ART
ART CONNECTIONS
19TH CENTURY AMERICA
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By the early 1860s, the thirst for knowledge of the American West had reached a
fevered pitch. The Western landscape that was imbued with competing national,
sectional, religious, and philosophical meanings became the chosen subject
matter for many painters, photographers, novelists, essayists, ministers, and
social commentators. In particular, the region of Yosemite in California
received a significant amount of this attention. Various photographic views of
Yosemite were mass-produced and circulated in the early 1860s. For example, New
Yorkers had been able to see Carleton Watkins' photographs of Yosemite and the
so-called Big Trees in 1862. Boston Transcript readers had lived the
California experience through the stories and published epistles of their own
native son and preacher, Thomas Starr King. It was against such a backdrop that
Albert Bierstadt, along with writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, set off in May 1863 to
observe, capture, and convey the majesties and the power of the Far West.
By August 1863, Bierstadt, Ludlow, and their entourage were on their way from
San Francisco to Mariposa, and then on into the heart of Yosemite. Writing of
his experiences some seven years after the trip, Ludlow remarked on the artistic
dimension of the trip:
Bierstadt's work reveled in the beauty and majesty of the natural wonders. In
1864, probably as a result of Bierstadt's presentation of the new Eden,
President Lincoln set aside Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Redwoods as a public
park. This action, combined with the 1869 completion of the Transcontinental
Railroad, contributed to the great influx of tourists to Yosemite. Such an
increase led Bierstadt, upon his return to the region in 1872, to decry,
somewhat nostalgically, the lost untouched wilderness.
Bierstadt's Scene in Yosemite Valley combines drawings and elements from
his on-the-spot sketches and functions within the religious and sectionalist
rhetoric of the Civil War. During the war, in fact, the Western landscape with
its sweeping, untouched fertility and beauty was regarded as the necessary
antidote to the destruction leveled on eastern and southern lands. For some of
Bierstadt's audience, particularly those steeped in the war discourses, the West
symbolized a new beginning, a new Eden full of hope and peace, ready to take the
place of the war-damaged lands of the East.
Todd D. Smith
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Anderson, Nancy K. and Linda S. Ferber. Albert Bierstadt: Art and
Enterprise. Exhibition catalogue, New York: The Brooklyn Museum in
association with Hudson Hills Press, 1991.
Hendricks, Gorden. Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West.
Exhibition catalogue, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the
Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1973.
I will assert that during their seven weeks' camp in the Valley, they [the
artists] learned more and gained greater material for future triumphs than
they had gotten in all their lives before at the feet of the greatest masters.
In fact, when safely ensconced in his New York studio, Bierstadt converted his
plain-air work into some of the most eagerly anticipated canvases of the decade.
