The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
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Art Appreciation
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is an oil-on-canvas landscape painted in 1863 by the German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt; it belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (accession number 07.123).
The picture grew out of Bierstadt's first trip west. In the spring of 1859 he joined the Honey Road survey party of Colonel Frederick W. Lander and travelled as far as the Wyoming Range, sketching along the way; he later called the Rocky Mountains the best material for an artist anywhere. Back in New York he worked the studies up into a large composition, which he showed in 1863 at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he kept his studio. The peak was named for Lander at Bierstadt's suggestion after Lander died in the Civil War. The scenery is not a literal view of the place but an idealised arrangement built from nature and heightened for effect.
Across a canvas 186.7 by 306.7 cm, jagged snow-covered summits rise behind a waterfall that feeds a still lake, while the foreground is filled by a Shoshone camp with tipis, horses and people at work. Harper's Weekly in March 1864 praised the careful rendering of the village and suggested the work might be called a historic landscape. Later historians have linked the image to ideas of Manifest Destiny and to the West as Americans of the day hoped it would be.
Bierstadt promoted the painting with a one-picture exhibition, a pamphlet, engravings and a tour, and about a thousand of the 1,200 people invited came to see it. At the 1864 Metropolitan Fair in New York, held to raise money for the Union cause, it hung opposite Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the Andes, and it won a prize at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. The British railway entrepreneur James McHenry bought it in 1865 for $25,000, then the highest price paid for an American painting. Bierstadt later bought it back and passed it to his brother Edward, and the Metropolitan acquired it in 1907 through the Rogers Fund; there it still faces The Heart of the Andes.