Lot Essay
Albert Bierstadt made several trips to the Pacific Northwest between 1860 and 1890. His work in this region of the United States is best remembered in the spectacular panoramas of Mount Hood that he painted in the 1860s. In the summer of 1889, Bierstadt was commissioned by the Canadian Pacific Railroad to paint the glorious mountain vistas along the railway line. After his cross-country trip, Bierstadt boarded the Ancon, a coastal steamer, from Victoria, Canada to Northern British Columbia and Southern Alaska. On August 30, the Ancon crashed into a reef on Revillagigedo Island in Loring Bay, Alaska. Bierstadt documented this accident in his Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska of 1889 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts). In a letter to his wife, Bierstadt wrote: "...poor Ancon, it was a narrow escape. The steamer brought us back after 5 days living in Indian huts and salmon canneries. I was busy all the time and have 60 studies in color and two books full of drawings of Alaska." (N. Anderson and L. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise, New York, 1990, p.263) It is from the these studies that Bierstadt is thought to have produced The Island.
The Island is a typical example of Bierstadt's dramatic celebration of an unspoiled wilderness. His mastery of light is evident in the composition in which a divine light descends through the clouds casting reflections on the still, clear body of water and the reverent Indians along its shore. This small group of Indians are the only suggestions to human life in the painting. They become dwarfed by the rock formation, majestic waterfall, and low lying clouds. The light, the stillness, and the warmth surrounding the majestic mountains project a spiritual silence. Bierstadt's earlier artistic training in Düsseldorf provided him with the necessary skill and technique, but the grandeur of the West provided him with the monumental vistas which would become his trademark.
A contemporary critic James Jackson Jarvis, praised Bierstadt's scientific expression of nature: "He seeks to depict the absolute qualities and forms of things. The botanist and geologist can find work in his rocks and vegetation. He seizes upon natural phenomena with naturalistic eyes. In the quality of American light, clear, transparent, and sharp in outlines, he is unsurpassed." (G. Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West, New York, 1974, p. 144) In The Island, the detail of the Indians, the rock formation, the island, the waterfall, and the powerful rays of light attest to the artist's communion with nature.
Bierstadt's synthesis of the broadly monumental and the finely detailed, of grand scale and the intimate moment and infinitely varying forms, places his work among the most successful expressions of the many paradoxes of nature. This expression, through Bierstadt's attention to detail and evocation of light, harmoniously brings together the spiritual and natural world.
The Island could possibly be Bierstadt's painting entitled Loring Bay, Alaska, which James D. Gill offered for sale in 1893 at an exhibition in his gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. Gill had sold other paintings by Bierstadt, and The Island was in a collection in Springfield when it was acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago.
The Island is a typical example of Bierstadt's dramatic celebration of an unspoiled wilderness. His mastery of light is evident in the composition in which a divine light descends through the clouds casting reflections on the still, clear body of water and the reverent Indians along its shore. This small group of Indians are the only suggestions to human life in the painting. They become dwarfed by the rock formation, majestic waterfall, and low lying clouds. The light, the stillness, and the warmth surrounding the majestic mountains project a spiritual silence. Bierstadt's earlier artistic training in Düsseldorf provided him with the necessary skill and technique, but the grandeur of the West provided him with the monumental vistas which would become his trademark.
A contemporary critic James Jackson Jarvis, praised Bierstadt's scientific expression of nature: "He seeks to depict the absolute qualities and forms of things. The botanist and geologist can find work in his rocks and vegetation. He seizes upon natural phenomena with naturalistic eyes. In the quality of American light, clear, transparent, and sharp in outlines, he is unsurpassed." (G. Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West, New York, 1974, p. 144) In The Island, the detail of the Indians, the rock formation, the island, the waterfall, and the powerful rays of light attest to the artist's communion with nature.
Bierstadt's synthesis of the broadly monumental and the finely detailed, of grand scale and the intimate moment and infinitely varying forms, places his work among the most successful expressions of the many paradoxes of nature. This expression, through Bierstadt's attention to detail and evocation of light, harmoniously brings together the spiritual and natural world.
The Island could possibly be Bierstadt's painting entitled Loring Bay, Alaska, which James D. Gill offered for sale in 1893 at an exhibition in his gallery in Springfield, Massachusetts. Gill had sold other paintings by Bierstadt, and The Island was in a collection in Springfield when it was acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago.