Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Illuminating the West;



Illuminating the West;

 Painting in the Hudson River School Style

 
Albert Bierstadt
Sierra Nevada Morning
Oil on canvas, 1870
Gilcrease Museum permanent Fine Art collection.


            Albert Bierstadt (German-American, 1830-1902) was born in Solingen, Germany January 7, 1830; he moved with his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1833 at the age of 3. At the age of 23 (1853), he returned to Dusseldorf, Germany to study with Andreas Aschenbach and Karl Friedman Lessing, both landscape painters. He traveled and painted with fellow students Sanford Gifford and Worthington Whittredge through Europe. Bierstadt eventually returned to the United States in 1857, this time to paint the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His first exhibit with The National Academy of Design in New York took place in 1858; he had fourteen entries which included one of the largest paintings in the exhibit, Lake Lucerne. During this time he sold the first museum acquisition of his works to the Boston Atheneum for $400, titled The Portico of Octavia, Rome.
While in New Bedford, MA in 1859, Bierstadt attended a Lecture on the American West by Bayard Taylor which would ultimately end up playing a large role in the rest and most important part of his career. A year later he found himself on an expedition to survey wagon routes through the Rocky Mountain and Wyoming. From this adventure Bierstadt painted scenes from sketches he had done of Indians, landscapes and wildlife in the style he had learned in Europe. Consequently, his first big Western painting from this period, The Base of the Rocky Mountains, was lost in 1922; it had been on loan to a high school in Buffalo, New York. Bierstadt traveled to Yosemite in 1863 with painters Virgil Williams and Enoch Wood and writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, for a painting retreat; the paintings Bierstadt produced on this trip made him immediately famous. While Bierstadt’s painting style and career suffered a setback in the 1870’s with the onset of the Impressionist styles from Europe he kept painting and he is now considered “the most famous and financially successful late 19th-century painter of the American western landscape” (http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=6467).

Bierstadt’s painting Sierra Nevada Morning (1870) shows the style of The Hudson River School, which Bierstadt was a member. It depicts a calm tranquil American west, soft billowy clouds being illuminated by an early morning sun giving way to what promises to be a glorious day after what might have been a stormy night. The method in which the clouds are painted, from dark gray-green gently transitioning to soft hues of purple and blue and ultimately converging with the whitest of white, give the illusion of movement; this gives the viewer the feeling of a cool early morning with nothing but the clean smells of nature surrounding them and a cool breeze tenderly stroking their cheek. One can almost hear the gently rustling of the leaves as the wind gently parts the clouds giving way to a clear white-blue sky. The beautiful greens, oranges and reds of the foliage suggest a fall setting possibly the beginning of the season with a hint of fallen leaves. The attention to details in highlighting the apparent sharp edges of the rocks gives the sense of them being lightly touched with morning dew.  A tranquil body of water reflects the surrounding trees, mountains, deer and even the billowing clouds with a touch of rippling near the water’s edge and at the deer’s feet. It is a welcoming sight, beckoning the viewer to stake a claim, plant roots, start fresh and build a life there in order to see this calming site upon awakening every day. 

This painting along with many others painted by Albert Bierstadt and fellow painters; “John F Kensett (1816-1872), Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1816-1880), Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900)” (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hurs/hd_hurs.htm) and other members of the Hudson River School “created visual embodiments of the ideals about which Emerson, Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant and Whitman wrote” (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ihas/icon/hudson.html).