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The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak by Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt · 1863

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The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, painted by Albert Bierstadt in 1863, is a landscape that doubles as an elegy. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is enormous, over ten feet wide, and in 1865 it sold for $25,000, the highest price ever paid for an American painting at the time.

The peak at the center is not an ancient, inherited name. Bierstadt christened it himself, for Frederick W. Lander, the surveyor who led the 1859 expedition where the artist made his sketches. Lander was killed in the Civil War at the Battle of Ball's Bluff in 1862, before Bierstadt ever put brush to canvas. The mountain is a headstone.

In the foreground, a Shoshone encampment rests in a golden meadow. Bierstadt painted it in 1863, the same year the Bear River Massacre killed hundreds of Shoshone people just over a hundred miles from this site. The light that bathes the valley is the light of American luminism, a light that reads as divine blessing poured onto a landscape. It is the most beautiful possible rendering of a world on the verge of disappearance.

Frederick Lander never saw the peak that carries his name. The people Bierstadt painted never saw the painting. It is a record of what was about to be lost, lit like a promise.

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Details

The painting's namesake and spiritual center , Bierstadt bathes it in an interior glow that reads as divine promise, not mere sunlight, the visual argument for Manifest Destiny.
The painting's namesake and spiritual center , Bierstadt bathes it in an interior glow that reads as divine promise, not mere sunlight, the visual argument for Manifest Destiny.
Bierstadt's luminist signature: light appears to emanate from within the clouds rather than from any visible sun , a painterly theology as much as a meteorological observation.
Bierstadt's luminist signature: light appears to emanate from within the clouds rather than from any visible sun , a painterly theology as much as a meteorological observation.
Bierstadt deploys this shadow curtain as a theatrical device , the darkness makes the sunlit valley beyond appear to glow from within, a stage trick disguised as a forest.
Bierstadt deploys this shadow curtain as a theatrical device , the darkness makes the sunlit valley beyond appear to glow from within, a stage trick disguised as a forest.
The human anchor of the composition; set comfortably in the landscape, yet 1863 audiences understood the encampment sat at the edge of erasure , presence and elegy at once.
The human anchor of the composition; set comfortably in the landscape, yet 1863 audiences understood the encampment sat at the edge of erasure , presence and elegy at once.
Mirrors the left frame to complete the proscenium composition , nature arranged as panoramic theater, the West as spectacle for an eastern audience who would never visit.
Mirrors the left frame to complete the proscenium composition , nature arranged as panoramic theater, the West as spectacle for an eastern audience who would never visit.
Transcript

In 1865, one American painting sold for an unheard-of sum. Twenty-five thousand dollars. A record. Albert Bierstadt painted it from sketches made six years earlier. He named this summit for Frederick Lander, who led that expedition. Lander died in the Civil War, two years before the painting was finished. So Bierstadt made his friend's name the center of a promised land. Below the peak, a Shoshone encampment catches the last of the light. The painting's light is a theology. Everything in this valley is about to change.