Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast is an oil on canvas painted in 1870 by the German-born American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt; it is in the Seattle Art Museum (accession 2000.70).

Bierstadt chose the subject at a moment when the Pacific Northwest was suddenly in the news. Once the transcontinental railroad was completed at Promontory, Utah, on 10 May 1869, investors turned to Washington Territory and to the proposed Northern Pacific Railroad, which was to run from the upper Mississippi to Puget Sound. Bierstadt had travelled along the Columbia River and the Northwest Coast in 1863, but he had probably never been to the Sound itself. He assembled the scene instead from oil studies of landforms and Native people made along the Columbia, from Northwest Coast objects he had collected, which reappear in the painting, and, the museum suggests, from an illustration in James Gilchrist Swan's 1857 book The Northwest Coast.

The large canvas, 52 1/2 by 82 inches (133.4 by 208.3 cm), sets a group of Native people with their canoes on a curving beach beneath a wind-bent tree, while surf breaks against rocks and a wall of storm cloud rises over the water, pierced by a shaft of light. Bierstadt, a skilled promoter of his own work, painted it not at his home up the Hudson but in a Manhattan studio lent by a fellow artist, where visitors could follow his progress; one New York reviewer took the result for a faithful portrait of the place.

The painting may have been commissioned by a New York shipping magnate who had made his fortune in Pacific trade. The China-trade merchant Abiel Abbot Low of Brooklyn owned it by March 1872. After his death in 1893 it passed to one of his sons and later to the New York dealer Emmanuel David, whose nephew Philip R. Herzig kept it from 1949 until 2000, when the Seattle Art Museum bought it with a gift from the Friends of American Art and the General Acquisition Fund.