Quote from Wikimedia Commons: Albert Bierstadt enjoyed great success in the years surrounding the Civil War, producing finely detailed vistas of nature’s splendor in majestic canvases that were similarly invested with significance beyond their surface appearance.
The first technically advanced artist to portray the American West, Bierstadt offered to a rapidly transforming nation pictures whose spectacular size and fresh, dramatic subject matter supplied a visual correlative to notions of American exceptionalism, while also contributing to the developing concept of Manifest Destiny.
Trained in the highly finished manner of the Düsseldorf Academy, Bierstadt’s precise style imbued his works with a reassuring sense of veracity despite their sublime subjects and occasional liberties with geographic reality. In Mount Adams, Washington, he characteristically combined an impressively scaled natural background with a foreground view of American Indian life, which serves to heighten the picture’s putative realism even as it enhances its exotic appeal.
The implied movement of the clouds and the sunlit figures on horseback similarly off to the right seems to open up the depicted space for the viewer to inhabit, providing an apt pictorial metaphor for the actual occupation and exploitation of the West by the eastern interests that constituted the artist’s clientele.
Credits and Attributions:
Mount Adams by Albert Bierstadt [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:1875, Bierstadt, Albert, Mount Adams, Washington.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:1875,_Bierstadt,_Albert,_Mount_Adams,_Washington.jpg&oldid=272380899 (accessed March 9, 2018).
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 
And lo they did make camp below the mountain
Weary of their search for a youthful fountain
With the horses unsaddled and fed
The travelers slipped into bed
There to remember the sheep they were countin’.
(C)2018
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That painting is very powerful, majestic, and beautiful. Thank you for sharing this, Connie. I wasn’t even aware of this artist until now!
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I’m glad you like his work–Mount Adams is one of the lesser known volcanoes in Washington, as Mount St. Helens overshadows it. It is actually only about 70 miles south of my home and in my younger days I fished the rivers near there, so the fact he painted it was a source of amazement to me, and I wanted to share it.
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