Albert Bierstadt, (American, 1830-1902), Yosemite Valley, 1880, Oil on paper on canvas. Gift of Robert R. Rockwell, Jr. 78.15 F
Curator of Collections, James Peck Rockwell Museum of Western Art
This program is sponsored by the Watkins Glen Harbor Hotel
Albert Bierstadt
From the beginning, Albert Bierstadt took a businesslike, entrepreneurial approach to art. In time, his focus on business made him both wealthy and famous. Yet to many critics, Bierstadt's brilliant technical ability to transcribe nature epitomized flash over substance, facility with paint over thoughtful creativity. His focus on fame and wealth only reinforced these prejudices.
Beginning in the late 1850s, Bierstadt traveled to the West numerous times. In search of saleable subjects, the artist traveled widely, searching out new and interesting views. Though Bierstadt spent much time in the wilderness drawing scenes from nature, his finished Western landscapes were composed in a studio, and often included fanciful combinations of elements which were not always true to nature. During the 1860s, Bierstadt's reputation reached a high point thanks to his "Great Pictures" of western landmarks such as Yosemite Valley. These huge paintings, often 6 x 10 feet or larger, toured the country, making Bierstadt wealthy and famous. His most outstanding "Great Picture," The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, sold for $25,000 in 1863.
At the time, many Americans believed that it was their country's destiny to occupy and "civilize" the continent from coast to coast. This is what Bierstadt was selling - grandiose paintings celebrating Manifest Destiny. Bierstadt conveyed the power of spectacular Western scenery to an Eastern population who had never seen anything like it before. Since few people on the East coast had any real idea what the West looked like, Bierstadt's creative recombination of natural features went largely unnoticed. By the 1870s, Bierstadt's grand, operatic images of the far West were falling out of favor. As he became less popular in America, Bierstadt tried repeatedly to expand his market to Europe and Russia, and he even sold some of his massive paintings to the United States Congress. By the 1880s, Bierstadt was part of an older, outmoded generation, and his reputation went into a steep decline. In time, his critical fortunes rebounded, and by the middle of the twentieth century he was once again celebrated as one of America's premier artists.
Yosemite Valley (Rockwell Museum of Western Art)
Bierstadt first travelled to California in the early 1860s, at a time when his critical fortunes were at a high point. In 1863, Bierstadt travelled for the first time to Yosemite Valley. He spent several weeks camped out gathering sketches from various spectacular viewpoints. He would return to Yosemite many times, and completed paintings from various parts of the valley throughout the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. Much as Thomas Moran became identified with Yellowstone, Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains became, in many respects, Bierstadt's signature subject.
Yosemite Valley is typical of the smaller, more saleable paintings Bierstadt made during the 1880s, many of which revisited his most popular views from previous decades. Over the years, Bierstadt painted several of the more picturesque waterfalls in the Yosemite Valley, including Yosemite Falls, Bridal Veil Fall, Vernal Fall, and Nevada Fall. The Rockwell painting depicts Nevada Fall, a 600 foot high waterfall on the Merced River. The Nevada Fall is recognizable for its bent shape, in which the water free-falls for about the first third of its length, then collides with a steep, slick-rock slope. This mid-fall impact of water onto the cliff face creates a turbulent whitewater area in the falls, which produces a large amount of mist. The mist led to its name, Nevada, a Spanish word meaning snowfall.
Albert Bierstadt, (American, 1830-1902), Nevada Falls, Yosemite, 1872-1873, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art 1979.490.3
Nevada Falls, Yosemite (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Much like Nevada Falls, Yosemite (Metropolitan Museum of Art), a similar painting completed almost a decade earlier, Yosemite Valley places the viewer at the heart of the waterfalls' mist, turbulence and power. The awesome nature of the fall is emphasized through the viewer's proximity to the whitecaps in the mid-ground. However, Bierstadt makes two important adjustments from the earlier Metropolitan painting. First, he removes any sign of humanity in the Rockwell painting. In the Met painting, the foreground is dominated by a traveling party of a man and two women who have taken a moment's rest on a fallen tree at the base of the fall. The Met painting also includes a suspension bridge across the most turbulent aspect of the fall. In the later Rockwell painting, all of these signs of civilization have been erased. As if to compensate, however, Bierstadt tames the whitewater of the lower fall, which in the Met painting threatens to overtake the traveling party. Finally, in the Rockwell painting, Bierstadt lightens his palette considerably, taking an overcast sky and transforming it into a spectacular, sunny California day.
James Peck Curator of Collections Rockwell Museum of Western Art
