Sign In

- Or use -
Forgot Password Create Account
This item has been sold, but you can enter your email address to be notified if another example becomes available.
Description

Magnificent view of Mt. Rosalie (now Mt. Evans) in Colorado by Edward Bierstadt.

This work was started during the artist's trip to Colorado in 1863 and finished in his studio in New York in 1866. This chromolithograph was issued by Thomas McLean as a pair to The Rocky Mountains (Landers Peak). It was reported at the time that no fewer than twenty, and as many as thirty, stones were used to capture the rich, sumptuous palette of the original painting, which is now in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and measures approximately 12 feet by 7 feet. As noted on BMA website:

In 1863, Albert Bierstadt made an arduous expedition to Colorado in order to gather studies of the region for this monumental painting, executed three years later in his New York studio. For the final canvas, he exercised artistic license-rearranging some landmarks and exaggerating the scale of others-to maximize the visual interest of this Rocky Mountain landscape. The picture toured the country on a yearlong exhibition and thrilled audiences with its dual effects of sublime grandeur and reportorial detail. Soaring peaks, expansive valleys, and turbulent weather conditions create a dramatic backdrop for the meticulously detailed flora and a Native American hunting scene in the foreground. Mt. Rosalie (now Mt. Evans) appears in spotlight within a ring of dark clouds in the upper left corner of the composition. Bierstadt established his artistic reputation with "Great Pictures" of the American West that embodied the national agenda of expansionism known as Manifest Destiny.

Link here to the original painting, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/1558/A_Storm_in_the_Rocky_Mountains,_Mt._Rosalie

Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902) was a German-American painter best known for dramatic landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.

Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career.

Though a tremendous commercial success, Bierstadt was not well regarded by critics of his day. His large canvases were viewed as an egotistical indulgence. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed was the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc.

Reference
Deak, Picturing America, number 811 illustrated; Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt Art & Enterprise, pp. 274-275, number 79, figure 90, illus. p. 292.