American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Virginia and Stuart Peltz

Literature

Katherine Manthorne and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame and the Romance of the Mountains, Newark Museum, New Hersey; in association with G. Giles Ltd., London, 2018, p. 14, cat. 1 (illustrated).

Note

German born artist Albert Bierstadt moved at a very young age to the United States with his family, settling in Massachusetts, but returned to his homeland in 1853 to study and paint the Alpine mountains and landscape. After returning to America in 1857, he made his mark at the 1858 spring exhibition of the National Academy of Design, where he showed a large-size painting of Lake Lucerne and the Alps in the background. A year later he traveled out West joining Frederick W. Lander’s survey party of the Rocky Mountains, from where he returned with a trunkful of sketches, photographs, and Native American artifacts. Estes Park Morning, Colorado reveals the extent to which Bierstadt, on his first trip, was still very much conditioned by the European aesthetic and mountainous landscape that had been an important part of his training back in Düsseldorf. The painting adopts a formula which already proved successful: a dark, shady foreground contrasted with a light, golden background of snow-capped mountains and a stormy sky, dramatically separated by a middle ground of water, which captures all the glistening effects of the sun shower. A diagonally-bent repoussoir tree at bottom right connects the three successive layers, and invites the viewer to slowly penetrate the picture plane and gape in awe at the spectacular vision.