#FineArtFriday: Mount Adams by Albert Bierstadt (revisited)

I live just north of Mount Adams. When you drive down past Mt. St. Helens, you often catch glimpses of this majestic volcano, but it is not usually on the tourist routes. Several of our native tribes call this mountain Klickitat, and some call it Pahto. Although Adams has not erupted in more than 1,000 years, it is not considered extinct.

I find it interesting that while it is the second-highest mountain in Washington State, after Mount Rainier, it is the least well-known to me. As a child, we stayed at Spirit Lake Resort (long before the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens) and often camped at places near Goat Rocks. Sometimes I saw it from afar and wondered but never visited.

My father was an amputee, and 1940s prosthetics were rudimentary at best. He was unable to wear his prosthetic leg and walked on crutches. He adored fishing, but couldn’t hike for any distance, so we trailer-camped in places where he could fish from a boat. While there were camp sites in the Mt. Adams area, one often had to hike into them. But despite Dad’s disability, we traveled every summer and saw as much of our beautiful state as we could.

I don’t know if Bierstadt actually visited Mt. Adams, or painted this from what he was told–he was famous for painting scenery he had never seen and doing it with some accuracy.

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).