A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

The German-born American painter Albert Bierstadt's A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie is an oil on canvas signed and dated 'ABierstadt / N.Y. 1866' at lower right; it has been in the Brooklyn Museum, New York, since 1976 (accession 76.79).

The painting comes from Bierstadt's second journey west. In April 1863 he left New York with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, saying he was in search of a subject for a great Rocky Mountain picture. In Denver the newspaper editor William N. Byers guided him up Chicago Creek to the Chicago Lakes, where Bierstadt made pencil sketches and oil studies of storm clouds drifting over granite peaks, and climbed the highest snowy summit of the group. Finding it unnamed, he called it Mount Rosalie after Ludlow's wife, Rosalie Osborne Ludlow. She later divorced Ludlow, and Bierstadt married her in November 1866.

Bierstadt completed the canvas, 210.8 by 361.3 cm, in his New York studio. It was conceived as a 'Great Picture', one of the huge, dramatic canvases that artists of the period exhibited under theatrical lighting to paying audiences. A black thunderhead fills the centre while shafts of light strike the cliffs and a lake; the snow-capped peak appears through a gap in the clouds at upper left, and in the foreground Native hunters pursue deer near an encampment beside a stream. The museum notes that Bierstadt rearranged real landmarks and exaggerated their scale for effect.

On 7 February 1866 the painting was shown for a single day and evening at the Somerville Art Gallery in New York as a benefit for the Nursery and Child's Hospital, and it then toured the United States for a year. The mountain itself was renamed in 1895 for John Evans, a former governor of Colorado Territory, and in 2023 became Mount Blue Sky after consultation with Arapaho and Cheyenne representatives.