Best known for his enormous paintings of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley, Albert Bierstadt epitomized the Western landscape for many Americans during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The artist, born in Germany in 1830, immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1832. Growing up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Bierstadt was about twenty years old when he began to teach art and exhibit his works locally. Soon afterward, he sought additional training in Europe, studying in Düsseldorf and traveling with other American painters through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. After his return to America in 1857, Bierstadt visited Newport and the White Mountains before making his first trip to the West with the Lander Expedition in 1859.

A second Western trip with Fitz Hugh Ludlow followed in 1863-64. Returning to New York City, Bierstadt captured the public's imagination with his first major canvas, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Over the next fifteen years, he enjoyed great fame for his large Western subjects, some of which achieved record prices for the work of an American artist. However, with the advent of newer styles in landscape painting during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Bierstadt's reputation declined sharply. The artist, unwilling to adapt himself to change, continued to travel widely, seeking material in Florida and the Bahamas, Yellowstone National Park, and Alaska, among other locales. Toward the end of his life, Bierstadt spent several months a year living in Europe. The artist died in New York City in 1902.

Despite its small size, The Currier's Mount Hood, Oregon effectively suggests the expansiveness of the Western landscape. Moving along the broad bend of the river in the foreground, the viewer's gaze travels across flat fields, over low foothills, and past a towering snow capped peak on the right. Farther in the distance, a line of mountains separates the land from the vaporous blue sky. Here and there, tiny buildings, presumably farm structures, emphasize the grand scale of the scene; at the same time, they lend a human presence that attests to the fertility and natural resources of the West.

Mount Hood is typical of the oil sketches that Bierstadt made in addition to his finished paintings. Relatively free of the formula compositions and exaggerated effects that appear in many of Bierstadt's large studio canvases, these small works reveal an artist whose capacity for direct observation and fresh seeing is greater than many critics have supposed. In Mount Hood, Bierstadt employs a reduced palette of blues and browns that effectively conveys the impression of natural light. Avoiding the dramatic storm clouds and fiery sunsets that feature so centrally in his larger paintings, Bierstadt opts here for a calmer, quieter portrayal of the landscape. Even the ostensible subject of the work -Mount Hood- appears off to one side, its iconic presence diluted as the viewer's gaze literally travels past it into the distant background. Bierstadt maintains visual interest by opening up the foreground and calling attention to the intricately meandering banks of the placid river. Balancing the lower half of the composition with the varied cloud forms in the sky above, Bierstadt arrives at an image that holds the viewer's attention without recourse to histrionics.

Untitled and undated, Mount Hood has also been identified as a view of Mount Rainier from the Puyallup River Valley in Washington State. Hood and Rainier are both volcanic peaks in the Cascade Range and both have similar profiles, making a precise determination of the subject difficult. The dating of the painting is equally problematic, as Bierstadt is known to have traveled to the region on several occasions beginning as early as 1863. In his 1964 article, "The First Three Western Journeys of Albert Bierstadt," art historian Gordon Hendricks was the first to suggest that the Currier's Mount Hood in fact depicts Mt. Rainier, adding that it was painted around the time of Bierstadt's Western trip of 1863-64. Compositional similarities between Mount Hood and the Currier's Moat Mountain, Intervale, New Hampshire (q.v.) of 1862 seem to support Hendricks's dating; however, such an assertion must remain tentative until a more thorough examination of Bierstadt's oeuvre can be made.

Mount Hood, Oregon is one of two paintings by Bierstadt that were bequeathed to the Currier Museum of Art by Henry Melville Fuller in 2002. The other is a fine coastal view entitled View near Newport.

VSD

REFERENCES

Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber. Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise. Ex. cat. Brooklyn Museum, 1990.

Gordon Hendricks. "The First Three Western Journeys of Albert Bierstadt." The Art Bulletin XLVI, no. 3 (September 1964): 333-365.