A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Bierstadt was born near Düsseldorf and raised in Massachusetts, and he learned to paint back in Germany before returning to America to find a subject. He found it in 1859, attached to a government survey expedition heading for the Rockies. What he brought back were sketches. What he made from them, in a studio thousands of miles away, were enormous theatrical canvases with light pouring through mountain passes like something out of scripture. They were exhibited singly, for money, to queues. The geography is often rearranged. Peaks get moved, valleys get deepened, light does things light does not do. That was rather the point. These were paintings sold to an eastern public who would never see the West, and they helped form the idea that public had of it. Taste turned against him in the 1880s, when the market wanted Barbizon subtlety rather than spectacle, and he died in relative obscurity in 1902. The reassessment took most of a century.