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

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

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Evening on Oneida Lake (Pl. I) carries on the same theme without the allegorical animals. Here the flood of orange light dissolves the shapes of the trees closest to the sun, suggesting the power of something as nonmaterial as light over the material world. For all his worldliness, Bierstadt did have a spiritual side and believed in an afterworld more beautiful than the world of nature. As he once wrote: "I firmly believe in the Great Future which God has prepared for us and I trust each day I am coming nearer to the life that will be in harmony with his."(9)

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If Sunset in the Yosemite Valley expresses a spiritual vision, two other views of the valley (Pls. III, IV) are more naturalistic, although both employ artistic strategies to create poetic reverberations. The two paintings share the same composition - the view looking east, with El Capitan on the left and Bridalveil Fall on the right. Both undated paintings were almost certainly done after Bierstadt's stay in California from 1871 to 1873.

Scholars have suggested that Looking Up the Yosemite Valley (Pl. III) could date from the 1860s,(10) but almost all of Bierstadt's exhibition paintings of that decade are dated as well as signed. Furthermore, the work seems to commemorate the artist's visit to the valley in June 1873, when he was accompanied by his wife, Rosalie, because two of the horseback riders in the distance at the left are women. Stylistically, both this painting and Yosemite Valley (Pl. IV) demonstrate the more naturalistic touch of Bierstadt's later exhibition-sized pictures.

Yosemite Valley depicts an autumn scene. Bierstadt did not experience autumn in the Sierra Nevada until 1872, when he made a tour of Yosemite and the Kings River country in late September and October. A comparison of this picture and a Kings River autumn scene entitled Valley in King's Canyon,(11) shows similar compositions, with El Capitan and Bridalveil Fall of Yosemite Valley replaced by the cliffs of the Kings River. Otherwise, the deer, the river, even the dead trees caught in the current, are similar. In all these paintings, the pastoral, park-like nature of the scenery prevails over the sublimity of the 1868 Sunset.

These works were motivated by the nineteenth-century belief in the salubrious effect of natural beauty on the human psyche. As the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) wrote in his preliminary report for the Yosemite Commission in 1865:

The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration of the whole system.(12)

The contemplation of a beautiful painted landscape was a vicarious way of attaining this beneficial experience.

Both Looking Up the Yosemite Valley and Yosemite Valley are tours de force of Hudson River school landscape practice in which a real scene is enhanced poetically through the manipulation of light. The shadowy foreground in both works emphasizes the bright appearance of the sunlit cliffs; the low point of view sets off their grandeur; the figures in Looking Up and the deer in Yosemite give a sense of scale.

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

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

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