Picture of the Day: For this I give thanks
By AcademicElephant Posted in Culture — Comments (20) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, 1868
Somehow I find myself returning to this Bierstadt painting each Thanksgiving. Maybe it's because when I'm in a certain teaching rotation, it comes up around this time so it's fresh in my mind. But whatever the reason, it has come to symbolize this most American of holidays for me.
Albert Bierstadt was an immigrant who came to America as a child. As such, he was able to fuse a traditional European style with the new subject matter and spirit of the United States. In his native Germany, the previous generation of landscape painters, notably Casper David Friedrick, had used a hyper-realistic style to express intensely Romantic content. Friedrich was not just painting what he saw; he used realism to make his personal vision accessible and plausible to his viewer. And so we find paintings such as The Wanderer above the Mists (1818), in which the viewer gets the somewhat uncomfortable impression that he, too, is perched on this isolated Alpine eerie gazing at a vista that is beautiful, yes, but also undeniably dangerous.
Bierstadt brought this legacy to the new world, where he became a member of the Hudson River Valley School. But he was not content to stay on the east coast, and made two trips west to explore more of this great new continent. He was awed by what he saw--mountains that dwarfed the Alps, exotic wildlife, dramatic weather that enlivened the apparently endless vistas. All this natural wealth was untouched by Europeans, and so provided a sort of modern day Garden of Eden full of promise and potential.
This was in Bierstadt's vision a land for giants--a land for heroes. He thus recorded it on enormous canvases; the Sierra Nevadas, for example, is 6x10'. European critics sneered that the painting was too big. Bierstadt, they argued, was trying to attract attention to his painting through its sheer size rather than through its inherent creative value. But for Bierstadt, the magnifcent scale of this new landscape was its most powerful feature, and it demanded an accordingly large canvas. And Bierstadt, like Friedrich, was not simply painting what he had seen on his western trips. He took his voluminous sketchbooks and photographic records back to Rome, where, in the heart of the classical tradition, he created a pastiche of different elements that came together to convey the overwhelming grandeur and variety that the artist had experienced on his journeys.
Bierstadt's vision was of an America whose whole was greater than her sum parts. While the individual elements in his composition were impressive in their own rights, together they transcend reality and represent the character--not just the appearance--of the new nation. Hence the glorious light that floods the painting with a spiritual, not just a physical, radiance. 130 years later, the painter's vision remains a powerful symbol of these states with their unmatched natural resources forming an intangible union that has proven the most powerful force for good in the world. Bierstadt could not have imagined the United States of 2006 when he sat in his Roman studio in 1868, but he recognized the extrardinary potential of this new world that stretches from sea to shining sea.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. God bless America.
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I hadn't read the Smithsonian site, but their education dept. put it better than I. Thanks!
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld
Great essay. Reminds me of the many wonderful essays by M. Therese Southgate that have graced JAMA.
http://www.amazon.com/Art-JAMA-Hundred-American-Association/dp/081510994...
Joe
...the New York City Opera performed The Midsummer Marriage, by Sir Michael Tippett (who attended, in full psychedelic regalia). Did anyone reading this see it? This Bierstadt was reproduced on front-lit scrim as the production "show curtain." If you've ever been in the New York State Theater, you know how big and high the stage is. Big enough to imagine you were actually in the landscape.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
We recently moved into a tiny apartment and I hung a Bierstadt print in an old window frame over the sink in the windowless kitchen. It gives me the illusion of looking out into a majestic scene that transforms the mundane task of washing dishes! Thank you for the information about an artist I admired without knowing much about. It's like gaining a better understanding of an old friend.
This painting is very magnificent and beautiful.
And it is Home! Thank God for His Amazing Glory which is compelled to express itself for our benefit!
Rose
Thank-you for that picture. It reminds me of Robert Hughes' wonderful series on American art ("American Visions").
Bierstadt's enormous "Domes of the Yosemite," (it must be at least 12' x 16'), hangs at the Athenaeum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. The painting, along with a good many others and some fine sculpture, is courtesy of the Fairbanks family, which left a rich legacy in this tiny corner of tiny Vermont, due to the wealth flowing from invention of the platform scale. Ironically, the local paper (www.caledonianrecord.com) today has an editorial that refers to "Domes." Worth a read.
Thank you for your wonderful essay.
You're neither good enough or smart enough to successfully imitate a conservative/Republican. I know, I know, the delusion is common among people who think that their political opponents are Fascists and that the American people are dumbed down, but there are plenty of other sites that will cater to your ilk.
Go find one.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC.
the view out my windows and off my deck! That has nothing on it, and mine isn't even special by the standards here. I have never failed to get a gasp out of guests from out of town when I turn my boat to come around Shelter Island towards Auke Bay harbor on a clear day; the whole northern horizon is the mountains and the face of the Mendenhall Glacier and the Juneau Icefield. Even though I've seen it hundreds of times, it remains breathtaking.
We have much to be thankful for in this wonderful, beautiful land.
In Vino Veritas
My wife and I have a large print of this painting framed and hanging on our bedroom wall, along many of our own pictures from our travels around the country. Thanks for sharing the view with us. ;)
Thanks for the post. You inspired me to go see the Constable exhibit at the East Wing of the National Gallery. (Most famous painting shown: The Hay Wain. Some similarities to Bierstadt (not that I'd know, really), in particular with respect to painting a dynamic sky -- clouds, shadows, sunlight -- to highlight landscape, with Constable's landscapes. (Or so I learned after attending the exhibit.) Constable appeared more interested in quotidian life of rural people, obviously.
Quote a shock coming out of the exhibit to immediately encounter a Lichtenstein. Awful.
Constable is in some ways the English equivalent to Bierstadt--intensely nationalistic.
Glad you liked the show. Good stuff.
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld
You see mountains and forests and a beautiful sunset.
I see Copper, Gold and Zinc mines.
I see millions of board feet of lumber for houses.
I see locations for millions of megawatts of hydro-electric generators.
Vizzini:
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is:
'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.'
But, only slightly less well known is this:
'Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!' "
I actually think that's integral to the painting's beauty--the extraordinary natural resources that are represented here are really Bierstadt's point.
"I'm kind of old-fashioned. I like to engage my brain before my mouth." Donald Rumsfeld
If you had read the comments, you might've noticed that a variation of that most excellent line has already been used once.
---
"I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more I have of it." -- Thomas Jefferson
I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful 100 percent.
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/landscape_pai...
Perhaps it's just as well that the painting is fictional. If it were real, then we could examine a photograph of how the scene looks today (golden arches and all)!