Nature's Nation: y1940-430

How Bierstadt altered reality and to what end are suggested by his 1875 painting of Mount Adams in Washington, one of several grand canvases depicting peaks in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range. In portraying it as he did, Bierstadt had the advantage of knowing that—even more than with his views of Yosemite—few easterners had seen the sight depicted, providing him a latitude similar to the one he exercised a few years before when moving from titles that were specific (Lander’s Peak) to generic (Sierra Nevada Morning) for some of his most operatic works. Bierstadt and Ludlow spent four or five days in the fall of 1863 on the Columbia River, which flows some thirty miles south of Mount Adams from headwaters in the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. The following year Ludlow published an article describing this portion of their trip, which makes it clear that the two never left the river and got no closer than this to the peak, which in any case would have been difficult at the time. A photograph from a few years later by Watkins (1829-1916) shows Mount Adams rising in the distance beyond the river and reveals how removed it in fact was from Bierstadt’s nearest vantage point. His nonetheless finely detailed portrayal of it includes, on the left, the peculiar, snub-nosed profile of Sleeping Beauty Peak, a nearly five-thousand-foot andesitic dike, shown in relation to the larger mountain as if from the direction of the river to the south Yet the distinctive silhouette of Bierstadt’s highly articulated Mount Adams is clearly the view from the west. To piece together this manifestly confected portrayal, Bierstadt must have relied on pictorial sources other than his own, which became available in the years between his trip and the execution of the work. Whatever the means, the image he produced is, like Church’s Cayambe,not the one the artist saw. Painting what he wanted instead of what was—while pretending otherwise—allowed Bierstadt to craft an image of western nature that was both sensationally appealing and ready for occupation. By arranging his image to feature the peak looming large and showing its most dramatic façade, as well as incorporating a second striking promontory arising from the flat, accessible, parklike plain, Bierstadt presented as alluring a picture of the place as might be imagined. Here Mount Adams is separated from the foreground scene merely by the morning mist, whose implied movement to the right seems to draw with it the Indigenous figures already conveniently making their way off the canvas, opening up the space for others to inhabit. In what might have been written to describe Mount Adams, the printed testimonial accompanying a popular engraving of Lander’s Peak referred to “the every-day life of that race which, before the advance of civilization, fades away like the mists of morning before the rays of the rising sun.” Genocide is presented as georgic, with the “passing away” of a people, as Bierstadt called it, rendered as natural as the earth’s rhythms. Unacknowledged in Bierstadt paradisiacal world is that the smooth meadowland depicted beneath Mount Adams was probably not there by accident, but was created by the area’s Yakima people through successive planned and controlled burns. The land was not only occupied but also cultivated before the artist’s arrival. Such knowledge would not have endeared the work to Jay Cooke, a financier earlier involved in the promotion of Yellowstone, to whom Bierstadt offered to give either this or another painting of the same title if he would agree to buy a larger one of Mount Hood. When the artist made this enterprising proposal in 1872, Cooke controlled the struggling Northern Pacific Railway, which set up colonization offices as far away as Germany and Scandinavia in an attempt to lure settlers westward. Stropped of its true context, however, Bierstadt’s Edenic painting might serve just as well as Church’s “travel posters” were meant to do for the Cyrus Field. But the trouble with Bierstadt’s vision, and Church’s mature one as well, is that in rendering nature as spectacular “other,” both artists ultimately remove it from the human realm and reify the notion, entrenched since antiquity, that humans and nature are not part of the same world—a great irony in light of Church’s embrace of Humboldt’s unifying rhetoric. Seen in this way, the vacating Indians in Mount Adams perversely connote the evacuation of all human presence implicit in such a weltanschauung, to use a Humboldtian term. He said, “The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have no viewed the world.” A truly comprehensive view of the world must entail an appreciation of humankind as but a part of the whole, not the reason for it—a piece, however powerfully pervasive, of a radically complex, interconnected web of existence. While seeking to enhance appreciation for nature, Bierstadt and Church in the end promoted its estrangement. Whereas artists of the picturesque encouraged access and entry into the surrounding environment—a move with its won imperial ramifications—artists of the sublime shut us out. --Karl Kusserow John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum