Illuminating the West;
Painting in the Hudson River School Style
Albert Bierstadt
Sierra Nevada
Morning
Oil on canvas, 1870
Gilcrease Museum permanent Fine Art collection.
Albert Bierstadt
(German-American, 1830-1902) was born in Solingen, Germany January 7, 1830; he
moved with his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1833 at the age of 3. At
the age of 23 (1853), he returned to Dusseldorf, Germany to study with Andreas
Aschenbach and Karl Friedman Lessing, both landscape painters. He traveled and
painted with fellow students Sanford Gifford and Worthington Whittredge through
Europe. Bierstadt eventually returned to the United States in 1857, this time
to paint the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His first exhibit with The
National Academy of Design in New York took place in 1858; he had fourteen
entries which included one of the largest paintings in the exhibit, Lake Lucerne. During this time he sold
the first museum acquisition of his works to the Boston Atheneum for $400,
titled The Portico of Octavia, Rome.
While in New Bedford, MA in 1859,
Bierstadt attended a Lecture on the American West by Bayard Taylor which would
ultimately end up playing a large role in the rest and most important part of his
career. A year later he found himself on an expedition to survey wagon routes
through the Rocky Mountain and Wyoming. From this adventure Bierstadt painted
scenes from sketches he had done of Indians, landscapes and wildlife in the
style he had learned in Europe. Consequently, his first big Western painting
from this period, The Base of the Rocky
Mountains, was lost in 1922; it had been on loan to a high school in
Buffalo, New York. Bierstadt traveled to Yosemite in 1863 with painters Virgil
Williams and Enoch Wood and writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, for a painting retreat; the
paintings Bierstadt produced on this trip made him immediately famous. While
Bierstadt’s painting style and career suffered a setback in the 1870’s with the
onset of the Impressionist styles from Europe he kept painting and he is now
considered “the most famous and financially successful late 19th-century
painter of the American western landscape” (http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=6467).
Bierstadt’s painting Sierra Nevada Morning (1870) shows the style of
The Hudson River School, which Bierstadt was a member. It depicts a calm
tranquil American west, soft billowy clouds being illuminated by an early
morning sun giving way to what promises to be a glorious day after what might
have been a stormy night. The method in which the clouds are painted, from dark
gray-green gently transitioning to soft hues of purple and blue and ultimately
converging with the whitest of white, give the illusion of movement; this gives
the viewer the feeling of a cool early morning with nothing but the clean smells
of nature surrounding them and a cool breeze tenderly stroking their cheek. One
can almost hear the gently rustling of the leaves as the wind gently parts the
clouds giving way to a clear white-blue sky. The beautiful greens, oranges and
reds of the foliage suggest a fall setting possibly the beginning of the season
with a hint of fallen leaves. The attention to details in highlighting the
apparent sharp edges of the rocks gives the sense of them being lightly touched
with morning dew. A tranquil body of
water reflects the surrounding trees, mountains, deer and even the billowing
clouds with a touch of rippling near the water’s edge and at the deer’s feet.
It is a welcoming sight, beckoning the viewer to stake a claim, plant roots,
start fresh and build a life there in order to see this calming site upon
awakening every day.
This painting along with many
others painted by Albert Bierstadt and fellow painters; “John F Kensett
(1816-1872), Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910),
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1816-1880), Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)” (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm) and other members of the
Hudson River School “created visual embodiments of the ideals about which
Emerson, Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant and Whitman wrote” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/hudson.html).
