Content provided in partnership with

Bierstadt paintings in the Haggin Museum - Haggin Museum, Stockton, California

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Alfred C. Jr. Harrison

Albert Bierstadt was a great American painter who received substantial critical acclaim when he was a young man in his thirties. By 1864, when his important painting The Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak went on exhibition in New York City, Bierstadt had risen to the top of his field, challenging Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) for leadership in American landscape painting.(1) Starting in the late 1860s, Bierstadt's reputation went into decline. His heroic transcriptions of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley, executed with precision and clarity, went out of fashion, supplanted by murky, roughly painted rural scenes inspired by the popularity of the French Barbizon painters. Bierstadt's works did not measure up aesthetically, and he offended nineteenth-century canons of artistic propriety by aggressively marketing his major works to rich clients. He also incurred the wrath of fellow artists by arrogantly circumventing official committees when getting his works accepted at expositions.(2)

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden: Coolest room on the block: have a bedroom that's way drab and boring? Hang ...; Reuse, recycle, remodel: environmentally friendly materials and techniques ...; Keeping it simple: interior designer Michael Lee finds an overdesigned ...; House of the Year: this craftsman-inspired home is factory-built--proving ...; Dreaming of cabin life: smart ideas for small spaces, plus the hottest spots ...; More »

In 1886 Bierstadt's California Oaks received a typically harsh reception in the Chicago Tribune review of the Inter-State Industrial Exposition in Chicago:

Its appearance here only serves to emphasize the wonder that such meretricious work should once have been the rage even among connoisseurs....Art has made such long strides since Bierstadt's salad days of California wonders that his picture seems almost like an offense among...the stronger modern canvases.(3)

The same reviewer heaped praise on a Barbizon-inspired landscape by the now little-known artist M. DeForest Bolmer (18541910), which depicted "a marsh meadow, a pool of dead water, monotonous salt grass, stunted trees on a little ridge and a stormy sky beyond."

A true man of the world, Bierstadt was aware of this change in taste and vet did not make radical changes in his approach to art, as did other artists of his generation, such as George Inness (1825-1894) and Homer Dodge Martin (1836-1897), who both found fame and riches painting Barbizon-derived works in their late careers. In his mature period Bierstadt sometimes did modify his style in subtle ways, toning down the exaggerated rhetoric of his early works and adopting the looser brushstrokes and more intimate tones of the Barbizon school.

In his lifetime, and today, Bierstadt's later work is judged to be inferior to his early paintings.(4) But is this really the case? A review of the twelve Bierstadt paintings in the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, casts doubt on the validity of this opinion. All but one of these pictures can be dated to 1873 or later, and several were painted in the 1880s.

The Bierstadt paintings, and almost two hundred other nineteenth-century American and European paintings, were collected by Louis Terah Haggin (1847?-1929), the son of the successful California entrepreneur, James Ben Ali Haggin (1822-1914). Louis Haggin, who was educated in France, Switzerland, and England and earned a law degree from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lived in San Francisco before moving to New York City in 1890. He was as much a man of the world as Bierstadt and cared as little about fads in art. He seems to have formed most of his collection between 1915 and his death, when the reputations of Bierstadt and most of the other artists whose work he collected - Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) and Jean Leon Gerome (1824-1904), among others - were out of favor. Haggin's daughter, Eila Haggin McKee (1873-1936), donated her father's collection to the museum being created in Stockton, where her husband, Robert, had grown up.(5)

The one Bierstadt in the collection dating from the 1860s is Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (Pl. II). It was painted in Rome during the artist's stay in Europe from 1867 to 1869 and exhibited in London, where it received a sympathetic review in the Art Journal.(6) The scene is a variant of Valley of the Yosemite of 1864 (in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The Merced River is framed by Sentinel Rock on the left and El Capitan on the right. Although Bierstadt used the same general composition in other major works of the 1860s, none has the apocalyptic light that pushes this sunset beyond credibility as a natural phenomenon. The unnatural chiaroscuro lifts this view into the realm of the frankly allegorical landscapes painted by Thomas Cole (1801-1848) a generation earlier.(7)

A Bierstadt painting that emerged on the art market in recent years entitled Nature's Paradise(8) throws some light on the meaning of Sunset in the Yosemite Valley. Nature's Paradise depicts the border of a lake bathed in a mystical orange sunset. In the foreground is a group of animals that would never congregate in nature, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom. A man and a woman sit by the lake staring raptly at the sunset. The vision is of a spiritual world before the Fall, created by exaggerating and heightening aspects of the real world. The exaggerations in Sunset in the Yosemite Valley transform the real Yosemite Valley into a similarly visionary experience, although contemporary critics often characterized such exaggerations as the artist's blasphemous "improvements" on God's handiwork.

Bierstadt paintings in the Haggin Museum - Haggin Museum, Stockton, California

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Alfred C. Jr. Harrison

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Autos

Most Popular Articles in Home & Garden

Most Popular Publications in Home & Garden