TOW #12

Rocky Mountain Landscape

Albert Bierstadt

            Bierstadt painted this in 1870, during that time American painting was reflecting an era heightened nationalism. Americans saw themselves as a group of people blessed by god with a divine path to greatness. A large part of this was based on the natural beauty in the vast American west. This idea of “Manifest destiny” also became a driving force for immigration to America.  Bierstadt himself was an immigrant, born in Prussia, he and his family moved to Massachusetts when he was one. Rocky Mountain Landscape is mesmerizing, it has a striking beauty that not many landscapes come close to.  Bierstadt employs extensive use up both lighting and shadows. This gives the Cascades in the background an almost godly image. The cloud bank frames a snow-capped peak in the top left highlighting its far off remoteness. The image is sealed from all sides in a boarder of darkness giving the view the impression that they have stumbled upon a hidden valley. He painted “Rocky Mountain Landscape”, in his Rome studio he hadn’t seen the American West for 7 years. Many have accepted that this painting like his other famous work “Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California” are fictionalized landscapes of places that Bierstadt had dreamed up. However that doesn’t make them any less powerful. They are mashups of many of the sights that he had come across in his journeys across the west in 1863 and 1859. In his two year tour of Europe Bierstadt displayed landscapes similar to this one creating a sense of wonder and opportunity around the idea of America.