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Lot Essay
Albert Bierstadt painted three large-scale versions of the present study between 1892 and 1893. The final work was to serve as the artist's entry to the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing in America. Bierstadt traveled to Spain, Italy and Portugal creating studies for the final composition, and later in the year to Watling Island in the Bahamas where Columbus was believed to have landed. The present work was likely executed there.
The largest and final of these compositions, which was given by the artist as a gift to his second wife Mary Hicks Stewart and was his largest known painting, was destroyed in a fire at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1960. The other two versions of The Landing of Columbus are currently in the collections of the City of Plainfield, New Jersey, and The Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.
The largest and final of these compositions, which was given by the artist as a gift to his second wife Mary Hicks Stewart and was his largest known painting, was destroyed in a fire at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1960. The other two versions of The Landing of Columbus are currently in the collections of the City of Plainfield, New Jersey, and The Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey.