Albert Bierstadt, Mountain Scene, Size: 14 ¾ X 21 in, Year: 1880-1890, Museum: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting Mountain Scene by Albert Bierstadt is presenting a peaceful setting of a lake, that is dead calm, there are three birds flying low over top of the water, maybe trying to catch the cool air off of the lake and the beautiful mountain range of the background in the sky that is lit up with the sun hitting the main mountain range with snow on it. Albert uses an arrangement of cool colors or darker colors in the water, the trees along the edge of the lake reflecting onto the lake and the shading of the mountains closest to the viewer. He uses the lighter tones to show the image of the main mountain range that the viewer is looking at with the snow on top of them and light blue sky surrounding them with an array of clouds to the edge of the mountains. Albert spatially puts us looking at this painting from the level of the lake looking into the mountain range with snow on it between the other sets of darker mountain ranges. He uses atmospheric perspective to draw our eyes from the lake and trees to the mountain range beyond them and then to the main mountain range with snow on top of them.
Albert Bierstadt was very passionate about nature, beauty and wilderness that it presents to us. He focused on those attributes through many of his paintings and how he painted. He was a man of the environment, making trips across the country just to paint several mountain ranges, lakes and river bottoms. I think he wanted to show everybody the elegance, the passion, the beauty, the spectacular scenery that nature or the environment had to offer. It was a place to escape, to get away from the city or towns and explore the world through a different point of view, the view of majestic country.
This was to our present knowledge, Bierstadts first contact with the vastness, awesome grandeur, and wild solitude of the mountains. It must have made a tremendous impression on a young man used to the flat sea coast.
Title: Albert Bierstadt and the White Mountains
Author: Catherine H. Campbell
Source: Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 21, No. 3(1981), pp. 14-23.
