Albert Bierstadt and the American West

There is something almost strange about looking at an Albert Bierstadt painting today. The places are real. Yosemite is real. The Sierra Nevada is real. The enormous redwoods are real too. Yet the landscape on the canvas often seems more orderly, more dramatic and somehow more spacious than a photograph of the same country.

That was part of Bierstadt's gift.

He knew how to make a mountain look enormous without losing the small details around it. A few trees, a person beside a horse, a patch of water in the foreground. Then the mountains begin, and suddenly the human figures look very small.

This is the America that appears again and again in his work. Not the streets and buildings of the growing cities, but the country beyond them. Rocky Mountains, California forests, high valleys, distant trails and Yosemite, still a remote place for most people who saw his paintings in the nineteenth century.

Bierstadt himself was not born in America. He came from Solingen, Germany, and arrived in the United States as a child. His European training stayed with him, especially in the way he handled composition and light. But the subject he found in the American West was something quite different from the landscapes he had known in Europe.

The mountains gave him room to work.

Mountains and distance

Look at Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California, painted in 1868. The first impression is one of scale, but the longer you look, the more you notice how carefully the picture has been put together.

There is water in the foreground. Trees frame the sides. A small group of figures gives the viewer a human reference point. Beyond them, the valley opens toward the Sierra Nevada. Light breaks through the clouds and lands on the distant landscape.

Nothing is accidental. Bierstadt understood that a mountain does not have to fill the entire canvas to feel enormous. In this painting, distance does much of the work. The eye moves from the people to the water, from the water to the open valley and finally toward the mountains. You almost travel through the painting before reaching the farthest peaks.

That sense of movement is common in his Western landscapes. The viewer is given somewhere to stand, then somewhere to go.

It is also worth remembering how unfamiliar these places were to much of his audience. A large Bierstadt canvas could bring the Sierra Nevada into a gallery in New York or London. People who had never been anywhere near California could suddenly stand in front of a huge painting and see what the West might look like.

"Might" is important here. Bierstadt was an observer, but he was also a painter. His finished landscapes were not photographs. He worked from sketches and studies made during his travels, then developed them into large studio compositions. Elements could be moved, enlarged or rearranged. Light could be changed.

The result was not necessarily a literal view from one particular spot. It was Bierstadt's version of the place.

Yosemite

Yosemite gave him an especially rich subject.

In 1863, Bierstadt traveled to Yosemite Valley with writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. He made studies during the journey and later used them when working on large paintings back in the East.

It is easy to see why the valley appealed to him. Cliffs rise almost vertically. Waterfalls drop from extraordinary heights. Forests fill the lower ground while the mountains create a hard boundary around the valley. There is already a kind of theater in the geography.

In Looking Up the Yosemite Valley, Bierstadt puts the viewer down among the trees and rocks. The foreground feels close enough to touch. Then the valley pulls the eye inward toward the cliffs.

It is a very different experience from Yosemite Valley, Also Known as Looking Down the Yosemite Valley. Here the viewpoint opens out. The valley becomes broad and distant, and the surrounding cliffs seem to form a huge natural enclosure.

These paintings are useful reminders that Bierstadt was not simply copying what he saw.

He sometimes altered the geography to make a composition work. The position of a waterfall, the shape of a cliff or the relationship between foreground and distance could be adjusted. The paintings remain rooted in real places, but they are constructed views.

That distinction matters when looking at Bierstadt. The question is not whether the painting is an accurate photograph of Yosemite. It is much more interesting to ask what he wanted us to notice about Yosemite.

The Giant Trees

His California redwood paintings approach the landscape from another direction.

In Giant Redwood Trees of California, the mountains are gone. The trees are enough.

Their trunks rise through the picture and seem to continue beyond it. Small human figures appear almost incidental beside them. They are there partly to tell us how large the trees are.

Bierstadt used this trick often. Put something familiar next to something immense and the scale becomes understandable.

The same principle works in his paintings of mountains. A tiny figure on a trail can do more than a paragraph of description. We see the person first, then realize how much country surrounds them.

That was one of Bierstadt's great strengths. He could make the size of the American landscape understandable.

A new picture of America

There was also a larger idea behind these paintings.

The American West was becoming a subject of fascination during Bierstadt's lifetime. Railroads were expanding. People were moving west. Reports, books and exhibitions were bringing distant regions into public conversation.

Paintings played their part.

A work such as The Oregon Trail includes travelers and animals, but the people never completely take over the picture. The landscape remains enormous. The trail disappears into it.

That balance says something about the period. The West could be presented as a place of hardship and uncertainty, but also as a place of possibility. Bierstadt's paintings contributed to the powerful nineteenth-century image of an immense American wilderness waiting beyond the settled East.

Today, that image can look idealized. Sometimes it is obviously idealized. Yet that does not make the paintings unimportant as records of American culture. They tell us not only what Bierstadt saw, but what his audience wanted to see.

Looking at Bierstadt now

The easiest way to approach Bierstadt is probably not to decide whether his landscapes are realistic or unrealistic.

Instead, look at how they work. Notice the little figures. Notice how often water leads into the distance. Look at where the brightest light falls. Look at the foreground and then at the mountains behind it. The paintings are full of small decisions that make the landscape feel much larger than the canvas. And then there is the West itself.

Bierstadt helped turn Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada and the great forests of California into recognizable images for people who might never have traveled there. His paintings gave distant places a public life of their own.

That is why the American West is so central to his work. The mountains and valleys were his subjects, but the paintings were also about how a young country imagined itself.

The places were real. The view was Bierstadt's.