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

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)

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.

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)

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.

One remarkable aspect of these works is that they have no known exhibition history before 1931. Despite the exhaustive research into Bierstadt's work that has been done over the last three decades, no one has given any clear idea of when either of these exhibition-sized works was unveiled to the public. One of Bierstadt's paintings at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 was entitled Yosemite, but as it was not described in the press, we do not know which painting was shown. It is hard to imagine, however, that either of the Haggin views was the target of the critical judgment expressed by John Ferguson Weir (18411926) in his report on the American paintings at the Centennial Exhibition: "[Bierstadt's] pictures...indicate a lapse into sensational and meretricious effects....They are vast illustrations of scenery, carelessly and crudely executed."(13)

In the Yosemite Valley (Pl. V) shows that Bierstadt occasionally modified his style in the direction of the prevailing Barbizon aesthetic. Although there is no documentary evidence that this painting dates from his late period, Bierstadt did visit Yosemite in August 1885,(14) and the style of the work is similar to the Canadian scenes in Plates VI and VII, which can be dated to Bierstadt's trip to British Columbia in the summer of 1889. All three paintings are in nearly identical frames characteristic of the 1880s and 1890s (see Pls. VIIIa-c). All three demonstrate a rougher, broader elaboration of the foreground rocks and foliage than early works, a diminished degree of idealization in their overall appearance, and a naturalistically rendered sunset, without any of the exaggeration that evoked words like "meretricious" from critics. These works come as close to the Barbizon aesthetic as any in Bierstadt's oeuvre.

All the works discussed above were done in the artist's studio based on studies made in the field. Hundreds of these oil-on-paper field studies have survived and make an argument for the proposition that Bierstadt was the best plein-air painter of his generation. Cloud Effect, Estes Park, Colorado (Pl. IX) is a superior example of the artist's field work. Bierstadt traveled to Estes Park in the summer of 1877 with Windham Thomas Wyndam-Quin, earl of Dunraven (18411926), who had bought thousands of acres in this scenic part of the West with the intention of building a resort hotel. Bierstadt used this and several other oil-on-paper studies as the basis for his huge melodramatic Rocky Mountains, Longs Peak of 1877 (now in the Denver Public Library). Bierstadt's instinct for the charm of a locality was so strong that considerable poetry is present in Cloud Effect and other field studies that were undertaken only to capture the lineaments of a real place. Bierstadt got into trouble when he consciously attempted to enhance the poetry inherent in his sketches when creating larger works. The resulting atmospheric pyrotechnics and exaggerations of topography vitiated any sense of local character and opened Bierstadt to the disdain of critics like Weir. But of course it was the large oil paintings and not the field studies that Bierstadt sent before the public.

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)

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.

Despite its realistic appearance, Dogwood contains a subtle allegorical program. Branches from trees on both sides of the composition form a Gothic arch, and the light that filters down through the forest canopy, reflecting off red and yellow autumn leaves, resembles the light streaming through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. In his works of the 1860s Bierstadt would have emphasized the allegory by introducing artificial motifs. Perhaps heeding his critics, the artist wisely modified this tendency in paintings such as Dogwood.

Forest Monarchs (Pl. XIII), called Woodland Landscape with Deer in the 1929 Haggin inventory, demonstrates that Bierstadt was sensitive to the popularity of Barbizon compositions. With its broadly painted open foreground giving way to a grove of old oak trees in the middle ground, this painting in its formal structure resembles a late work by George Inness or William Keith (1838-1911). In every other aspect, it lacks Barbizon feeling. The careful transcription of nature observed, including such realistic details as bark peeling off trees and greener grass bordering the creek, is not typical of Barbizon style, nor is the preternaturally bright tonality. This is a panorama of California scenery in its pristine state. No evidence of man's presence can be found. Deer, rather than the domestic animals found in Barbizon paintings, provide warm color accents that blend with the meadows and tree trunks.

Recent scholarship has characterized Bierstadt as an artist-entrepreneur whose paintings pandered to the expectations of the art market. But even in works like Forest Monarchs that responded to prevailing fashions in art, he remained true to his own vision. In the 1860s his occasional melodramatic excesses were generally forgiven, but after about 1875 his contemporaries could only see his faults, failing to recognize that he often painted landscapes of extraordinary quality, as those in the Haggin Museum plainly demonstrate.

1 The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Major works about Bierstadt include Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt Painter of the American West (Harry N. Abrams, New York, in association with the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, 1974); and Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1990). I would like to thank Nancy K. Anderson and William H. Gerdts for their generous assistance in consulting their research files on my behalf.

2 For an extended discussion of these issues, see Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, pp. 21-64.

3 September 2, 1886. The painting is unlocated.

4 See Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 61.

5 Patricia B. Sanders, The Haggin Collection (Haggin Museum, Stockton, California, 1991), pp. 13-20.

6 August 1868, p. 159, quoted in Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 207.

7 See, for example, Cole's Expulsion - Moon and Firelight of 1827-1828 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) in which a flood of orange light shines from the gates of Eden in much the same way the sunset enters Yosemite Valley in Bierstadt's painting.

8 Illustrated in American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Sotheby's (New York), March 17, 1994, Lot 51.

9 Quoted in Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, p. 316.

10 Sanders, The Haggin Collection, p. 32.

11 Illustrated in Important American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, Christie's (New York), December 4, 1992, Lot 253.

12 Quoted in Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Scribner, New York, 1999), p. 258.

13 Quoted in Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 59.

14 San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 1885.

15 For a discussion of this work and its exhibition history, see Gerald L. Carr, Albert Bierstadt: An Exhibition of Forty Paintings (Alexander Gallery, New York, 1983), No. 21.

16 See, for example, Seal Rock of c. 1872 in the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut (Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 239).

17 P. 350, quoted in Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, p. 262.

ALFRED C. HARRISON JR. is the president of the North Point Gallery in San Francisco.

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