Day 288 - Bierstadt



March 14, 2022

Gallery 760 turned out to be less intimidating than I'd feared. Aside from the Leutze, it centers on landscapes painted between 1850 and 1875.  I find myself a bit surprised that so many of the works depict foreign locales. Italy is a foregone conclusion, but Frederic Church also visited the Andes and, in one painting (again, annoyingly hung too high to see the details), he included images of sites on or near the eastern Mediterranean-  Palmyra, Petra, Constantinople, and the Acropolis.  I feel fortunate to have seen all but the last - and wonder how much of Palmyra is still standing after ten years of warfare in Syria.

I'm immediately drawn to a grand-scale (perhaps 5' X 9') oil by Albert Bierstadt because it reminds me of the Grand Tetons,  one of my favorite locales in the American West.  Executed in 1863, it's entitled "The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak," and in fact depicts a scene in the Wind River Range of the Rockies in Wyoming.  (Google tells me that the Wind River Range is a "sister range" of the Tetons.)  Bierstadt visited this area as part of a government survey expedition and presumably made sketches, although he actually painted this work on his return to New York. The painting shows, in the foreground, a verdant valley with an Indian encampment, in the middle distance a lake backed by a steep waterfall, and, in the far distance, craggy snow-capped mountains.  I presume that Bierstadt actually did see Indian settlements like this one, since some of the details (a horse laden with the body of an elk, a black and red blanket stretched on the ground) look realistic to me.

The painting's caption says that the work "advertised the landscape as a frontier destined to be claimed by White settlers, according to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny." But is this true, or is it just another example of the Met's desire to be oh so PC? It seems equally possible that Bierstadt simply loved the landscape and wanted European Americans to be aware of its glories. 

Less ideologically problematic is a smaller Bierstadt painting (perhaps 3 1/2' x 5') of the Matterhorn at sunrise.  The mountain in the background occupies the right side of the canvas and is balanced by tall pines in the foreground at the left side of the image; what lies between is obscured by mists. A rosy light suffuses the snowy peak and the clouds surrounding it.  

Bierstadt clearly delighted in painting mountains. 

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