Many famous American paintings of the 1800s show the land. Their painters stayed home. Most others trained in Europe. The first academies at home opened only in 1802 and 1805.
In 1870, the new Metropolitan Museum owned no paintings. By the late 1880s, about one in seven of the 7,000 Americans in Paris was an artist or art student.
In 1872, Congress paid 10,000 dollars for Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the first landscape to hang in the Capitol.
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How These Were Chosen
I only needed one of three things from a painting. It shows open land or open sea on this side of the Atlantic.
Or it centers on Americans, from a sitter the painter knew to strangers nobody can name. Or an American painted it in Europe. The twelve run from 1836 to 1942.
12. Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt (1868)
Rock walls rise on both sides of a mountain lake, and a thin waterfall drops down the cliffs. Sunlight breaks through the clouds above the far peaks and falls on the water. At the lake's edge, deer stand near the shore and ducks feed on the surface.
Albert Bierstadt painted this California valley in 1868, far from California. Bierstadt was born in 1830 in Solingen, in Prussia. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two.
In 1867 Bierstadt was invited to show two of his paintings privately to Queen Victoria. He stayed in Europe for more than two years. He painted Among the Sierra Nevada in Rome during the winter of 1867 to 1868. He worked from the studies he had made in Yosemite Valley in 1863. He then showed the canvas in Berlin and in London.
Only after that did he ship it to the United States. The first audiences to see this piece of California were European. Pictures like this one fed the image of America as a promised land. Europeans were emigrating to the United States in great numbers at the time. Bierstadt had made that crossing himself, as a small child.
The canvas is built to be read from across a room. In the lower left corner, a single trout hovers in a stream under the shadow of a rock.
It is too small to show up in most reproductions of the painting. To me, that trout sells the promised land better than the peaks do. A stream with fish in it is somewhere a family could settle.
At a Glance
Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830 to 1902)
Painted: 1868 (winter 1867 to 1868, Rome)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Where to see it: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
About This Painting
How big is Among the Sierra Nevada, California?
Among the Sierra Nevada, California measures 183 by 305 centimeters, 6 feet high and 10 feet wide. With its frame, it reaches about 8 by 12 feet.
Who owned Among the Sierra Nevada before the Smithsonian?
William Brown Dinsmore, president of the Adams Express Company, acquired it in 1873. He hung it at The Locusts, his family estate in Dutchess County, New York. His granddaughter Helen Huntington Hull left it to the museum, which catalogued it in 1977.
When did Bierstadt die?
Albert Bierstadt died suddenly in New York, on 18 February 1902.
11. The Boating Party, Mary Cassatt (1893 to 1894)
A man in dark clothes sits with his back to us and leans forward into a stroke of his oar. His dark shape fills the right side of the canvas. Facing him at the far end of the boat, a woman holds a small child in a sun hat on her lap. The boat's benches are painted yellow, and a sail swells above the boat. Mary Cassatt painted the scene in the winter of 1893 to 1894, at Antibes on the French Riviera.
She was born in 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh. She spent most of her adult life in France. In 1879 she became the only American ever to exhibit with the Impressionists, at the invitation of Edgar Degas. The Impressionists were Paris painters who ran their own shows, outside the official Salon.