A Storm in the Rocky Mountains painting by Albert Bierstadt

Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)

Title: A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Genre: landscape art

Date: 1866

Medium: oil on canvas

Dimensions: height: 210.8 cm (82.9 in); width: 361.3 cm (11.8 ft)

Collection: Brooklyn Museum: American Identities: A New Look, American Landscape, 5th Floor

What I love about this painting:

Albert Bierstadt painted his idea of what the American West of his time should be, grand, pristine, and wild. He painted what he saw, slightly fictionalized, so the viewer would see what he felt. He gave us entire stories on his canvas, epic explorations of the power and beauty of nature.

Bierstadt’s skies were imbued with high drama contrasted with peaceful vistas below. He took the places he had visited and made them bigger, grander, made the viewer feel the emotions he experienced when he first laid eyes on them.

About this painting via Wikipedia:

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie is an 1866 landscape oil painting by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) which was inspired by sketches created on an 1863 expedition.

Bierstadt traveled to the Colorado Rocky Mountains where he was taken up to the Chicago Lakes beneath Mount Evans. The painting is named after Bierstadt’s mistress and, at the time, his friend’s wife, Rosalie Osborne Ludlow. The painting, measuring at 210.8 × 361.3 cm (83.0 × 142.2 in), is exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, which acquired it in 1976.

The painting depicts Native American hunter/gatherers hunting deer in the foreground. A Native American encampment resides by a stream in the distance. The mountains are thrown into either sunlight or the darkness of a thunderstorm. In order to increase its dramatic value, Bierstadt exaggerated the scale of the Rocky Mountains.

Peering through a break in the clouds in the far distance is a snow-capped Mt. Rosalie, named after Bierstadt’s wife.

Upon its completion, the painting toured the United States for a year. On 7 February 1866, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie exhibited for one day and evening at the Somerville Art Gallery in New York City as a benefit for the “Nursery and Child’s Hospital.” [1]

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. [2]

About the Artist, via Wikipedia:

Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.

Bierstadt was born in Prussia, but his family moved to the United States when he was one year old. He returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. Bierstadt was an important interpreter of the western landscape, and he is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.