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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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One major painting in the Haggin Museum that flirts with melodrama is After a Norther, Bahamas (Pl. X), painted in the early 1880s. It is a larger version of The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (in a private collection), which was first exhibited in Boston in 1878, where it was positively reviewed in the Boston Evening Transcript on February 9. It was then shown at the National Academy of Design in New York City, where the critics savaged it.(15) After a Norther has the same triangular wave found in the earlier painting (and a number of others). The wave first appeared in several dramatic paintings of surf on the rocks of California done during Bierstadt's stay in San Francisco in 1872 and 1873.(16) In the two Bahamas scenes the artist has lightened the tint of the wave to give it a tropical coloration. The wave in the Haggin painting smashes into a rocky headland, throwing up a plume of iridescent spray, a masterly display of painterly virtuosity. In The Shore of the Turquoise Sea a section of mast from a shipwreck is caught in the breaking wave, a detail omitted in After a Norther, perhaps in response to a criticism in the American Art Review in 1880, which suggested that the wave would have been "ninety to a hundred feet high, judging from the cliffs and the spar."(17)

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What distinguishes After a Norther from hundreds of twentieth-century paintings depicting breaking waves is the skill with which Bierstadt rendered the water and sand and the impeccable sense of color that establishes the contrast between the cool water and the warm beach. Many of the details - the turtle and conch shell defining the scene as in the tropics and the way the raking light turns the spume a brilliant white against the dull storm clouds - beguile the viewer into believing he is contemplating a real scene.

Moose (Pl. XI), done about the same time as After a Norther, demonstrates the range of Bierstadt's capabilities in his later years. It depicts a scene in the Canadian wilderness, where he went big game hunting in December 1876 and again in 1880. Here Bierstadt displays his skill as a painter of animals, as well as his ability to capture the essence of dense eastern forest scenery. Ferns and birch trees are replicated with painstaking care, while the foreground of grass and fallen leaves is rendered in bold free brushstrokes not found in his work of the 1860s and early 1870s. Bierstadt used this loose touch selectively, creating the background forest in rich warm autumn tones that harmonize with the brown hides of the animals, but the animals themselves, particularly the central moose, are painted with a greater sense of finish. A mood of mystery is created as the eye is carried back into the depths of the woods, where the secondary animals emerge from the gloom. The painting seems calculated to appeal to the hunter with its suggestion that the woods are crawling with game.

Bierstadt returned to the theme of the woods in autumn in Dogwood (Pl. XII), which was entitled Autumn Woodland in a 1929 inventory of the Haggin Collection. It communicates a mood of quiet melancholy unusual for Bierstadt, and it is hard to resist the speculation that this undated work and Autumn Woods of 1886 (in the New-York Historical Society, New York City) reflect the artist's reaction to growing older as well as to suffering professional setbacks and the loss by fire of his country estate, Malkasten, in Irvington, New York. Another dark circumstance in Bierstadt's life at the time was the slow and debilitating illness of his wife, Rosalie, which forced her to spend several months each winter in Nassau, the Bahamas, away from her husband. In Dogwood two deer communicate mutely, separated by a long woodland path, and it is tempting to interpret this vignette as referring to the artist's separation from his wife.

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

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

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