Teach with Collections: Albert Bierstadt, Mount Adams, Washington

Albert Bierstadt enjoyed great success in the years surrounding the Civil War by producing finely detailed vistas of nature’s splendor on majestic canvases that were invested with a significance beyond their surface appearance. The first technically advanced artist to portray the American West, Bierstadt offered to a rapidly transforming nation pictures whose spectacular size and fresh, dramatic subject matter supplied a visual correlative to notions of American exceptionalism while contributing to the developing concept of Manifest Destiny. Bierstadt was trained in the highly finished manner of the Düsseldorf Academy, and his precise style imbued his works with a reassuring sense of veracity that their sublime subjects and his occasional liberties with geographic reality would seem to belie. In Mt. Adams, Washington, the artist characteristically combined an impressively scaled natural background with a foreground view of American Indian life, which serves to heighten the picture’s putative realism even as it enhances its exotic appeal. Conversation prompts What do you find to be the focal point of the composition? How does Bierstadt guide your gaze through the composition? How would you describe the depiction of the figures in the painting? What effect might this have on contemporary viewers’ understanding of the western landscape?