A Feature from June 11 Auction Lot 184

Albert Bierstadt

Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Chromolithograph

paper size: 31 1/2 x 18 inches

framed size 41 x 27 1/2 inches

London: Thomas McLean, 1869

  Bierstadt was among the most successful 19th-century artists who worked to capture America's hopes for future greatness in the untamed expanses of the West, creating images of grandeur which could not help but add to America's love of the mythic frontier and the spirit of adventure and discovery that it represented.  To achieve his glorious compositions, Bierstadt combined both imaginary and actual elements to create scenes that were based as much in reality as in the ideal.   In educating the American public about the West, Bierstadt depicted a landscape which could rival any in Europe in magnificence, while conveying a distinctly American pioneer spirit that embodied the compelling notion of Manifest Destiny.

Born in Germany in 1830, Bierstadt came to the U.S. in 1832.  He spent his childhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  At the age of 23 he returned to Germany to study at the Academy in Dusseldorf.  Afterward he painted with Worthington Whittredge in Rome, returning to the U.S. in 1857.  The next year Bierstadt headed west with Colonel Lander's surveying expedition to map an overland route from St. Louis to the Pacific.  Bierstadt left the party to sketch the Wind River and Shoshone country on his own.  In 1863 he made another western trip with Fitzhugh Ludlow, who recorded the journey in The Heart of the Continent (1870).  The success of the paintings inspired by that experience placed Bierstadt in competition with Frederic Church as America's most successful painter of masterpiece landscapes, and together the two became the first American artists to rival their European colleagues.

Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie is a chromolithograph after one of Bierstadt’s most celebrated paintings, now in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.  Contemporary critics described the image in this way: “A powerful light is streaking over the rocky gates of the mountain on the left, and radiating down on the lake in the foreground, which it seems to invest with enchantment.  Indeed, the light here is handled with such exquisite skill, and is so singularly pure and effective, that many of the spectators fancy it produced by some artificial means behind the canvas.”  Another wrote: “As a work of art, the picture is almost universally pronounced the best production of American genius.”  The chromolithograph was issued in the fall of 1869 by Thomas McLean of London and distributed in both the United States and Europe, answering to the spreading fascination for Bierstadt’s splendid views of majestic American scenery.

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For more information on our upcoming auction Please call 415-788-5115, Arader Galleries 432 Jackson Street, San Francisco, Ca 94111.

From Sea to Shining Sea: Karl Bodmer's American Expedition

Embouchure de Fox-River
23 ¼ x 17 ½

Karl Bodmer's is known for his magnificent series of ethnographic accounts of Plains Indian culture during the time of 19^th century western expansion. Bodmer was an unassuming Swiss painter when he was chosen by Prince Maximilian of Prussia to accompany his voyage to America, in order to document in pictorial terms his expedition. With the rest of Maximilian’s company, the two traveled among the Plains Indians from 1832 to 1834, a time when the Plains and the Rockies were still virtually unknown. The Bodmer/Maximilian collaboration produced a record of their expedition that is incontestably the finest early graphic study of the Plains tribes. Together the documented writing of Maximilian’s travels coupled with the iconic scenes of the West produced the seminal publication Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832-1843. 

Though Bodmer is most noted for his ethnographic drawing and paintings of the Plains Indians but his scenes of the North American views captured the mystique and majesty of the vast and diverse American  landscape. Maximilian and Bodmer journeyed from St. Louis up the Missouri River on the American Fur Company steamboat “Yellowstone,” stopping at a series of forts built by the Fur Company and meeting their first Indians at Bellevue. The travelers continued  to Fort Union, Fort Clark, and Fort Mackenzie, which proved to be the western most point of their journey. After living among and studying the Blackfeet tribe for several weeks, Maximilian decided that it was too dangerous to continue, so the travelers returned southward, reaching St. Louis in May 1834.

 Forest Scene of the Lehigh

23 ½" x 17 ½"

Cleveland Lighthouse
17 ½" x 12"

Once the journey was over, Bodmer spent four years in Paris supervising the production of the aquatints made from his drawings.These spectacular and atmospheric images are important and beautiful records of the landscape of the American West as it appeared when Bodmer saw it, just before westward expansion and industrialization took hold and began the indelible transformation of the frontier.

Junction of the Yellowstone River with the Missouri
24" x18"

A Selection of Bodmer's North American Views and Ethnographic works are available for purchase at Arader Galleries 432 Jackson St. San Francisco, CA 94111 
Please call 415-788-5115 with any questions