Wind River Country

Bierstadt painted this view of the Wind River Range in 1860, after his first trip west with the Frederick W. Lander expedition of 1859. He was thirty, living in New York, and establishing himself as the painter of the American West. Wind River Country is one of the first large-scale Western landscapes he produced after that expedition. The painting shows a wide valley in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, with mountains rising in the background under a luminous sky. A river winds through the foreground, its banks lined with trees. Native American figures are visible in the middle distance, small against the landscape. The light comes from the upper left, catching the peaks of the mountains and turning them gold against the blue sky. The valley is green, the river silver, the mountains a combination of blue and brown. Bierstadt was born in Germany in 1830 and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He returned to Germany to study painting in Dusseldorf, then came back to the United States and began painting landscapes of the American West. His first Western expedition was with Lander in 1859, which took him through Kansas and Nebraska into Wyoming. The sketches he made on that trip became the basis for paintings he produced over the next decade. The Wind River Range is in west-central Wyoming, part of the Rocky Mountains. Bierstadt painted it as a vast, empty wilderness, lit by a divine light. The Native American figures in the painting are small, almost invisible, which was typical of Bierstadt's Western landscapes. He presented the West as a sublime landscape awaiting American settlement, which was exactly what his Eastern audiences wanted to see. Oil on canvas, 74 by 107 centimeters, roughly 29 by 42 inches. Bierstadt used the smooth, detailed technique he had learned in Dusseldorf, building the landscape in thin layers. The mountains are painted with geological precision, each stratum visible. The sky is built in glazes of blue and white, with the light breaking through the clouds in shafts of gold. This print works in a living room or office, where the Western landscape and the luminous sky can fill a wide space. The blue and gold palette suits neutral walls, leather furniture, and brass fixtures. The 18x24 size gives the mountain details enough room to read. The painting is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.