Lot Essay
RELATED LITERATURE:
N. Anderson and L. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, Brooklyn, 1991, pp. 112-3
Storm Among the Alps was probably painted circa 1856, during Bierstadt's first return to his native Europe. As Nancy Anderson points out, Bierstadt's response to the landscape he saw on a summer trip to Switzerland was immediate and strong:
Although Whittredge confessed to feeling uncomfortable with the vertical sublime, Bierstadt responded enthusiastically, completing numerous sketches that he later used to compose studio paintings. In Switzerland's Alpine peaks, Bierstadt had unknowingly found ideal prototypes for what he would later see in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada...
N. Anderson and L. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, Brooklyn, 1991, pp. 112-3
Storm Among the Alps was probably painted circa 1856, during Bierstadt's first return to his native Europe. As Nancy Anderson points out, Bierstadt's response to the landscape he saw on a summer trip to Switzerland was immediate and strong:
Although Whittredge confessed to feeling uncomfortable with the vertical sublime, Bierstadt responded enthusiastically, completing numerous sketches that he later used to compose studio paintings. In Switzerland's Alpine peaks, Bierstadt had unknowingly found ideal prototypes for what he would later see in the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada...