Or, perhaps another Lander's Peak?
He became part of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran, is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School. [1]
(Wikipedia)
So here it is, a section close-up.
If it is not Bierstadt then what on earth is it???
Patching canvas hole and surface conservation ahead...
Another of his paintings, the actual "Lander's Peak", one in the Harvard Art Collection, has been described as follows:
- This painting is based on sketches and photographs that Bierstadt
compiled in the summer of 1859, when he joined a government survey
expedition led by Frederic W. Lander. But the work is an imagined view
rather than an accurate topographical rendering. Painted and exhibited
in Bierstadt’s New York studio, it is geared to the sensibility of urban
East Coast viewers. With its dramatic sunlit mountain range and
verdant, uncultivated valley, the painting portrays the American West as
an edenic landscape filled with hope and opportunity. It signals the
promise of new beginnings, a resonant theme for a nation torn apart by
civil war.
Bierstadt, one of the first American painters to explore the West, journeyed as far as the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. Though he encountered and sketched many Native Americans on his travels, this work does not include any signs of the indigenous population.
