Selling the Frontier
Albert Bierstadt did not paint mountains because he worshipped nature. He painted them because they sold tickets. It was 1866 and New York needed a spectacle. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains Mt Rosalie was exactly that.
The canvas was massive. It stretched over twelve feet wide. Bierstadt charged steep admission fees for people to walk into a theatrical room and stare at his painted frontier. The scale was entirely deliberate. It was designed to overwhelm the senses and empty the wallets of city dwellers who would never survive a real winter out West.
He built this beast of an oil painting from tiny field sketches he dragged back from an 1863 expedition. He took those scraps of reality and cranked the volume up to eleven. The light was too dramatic. The peaks were impossibly high. East Coast critics tore him apart for fabricating the majesty of the landscape. They missed the point completely. Bierstadt was not a documentarian. He was a showman.
He even sneaked a secret into the topography. The towering peak in the painting did not have a name on any map. Bierstadt named it Mt Rosalie after his mistress. She would eventually become his wife but at the time she was just a hidden truth painted larger than life. The critics argued over geology while the artist made a fortune selling them a beautiful lie.
References
Bierstadt Albert. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains Mt Rosalie. 1866. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum.
Anderson Nancy K. Albert Bierstadt Art and Enterprise. Hudson Hills Press 1990.
Hendricks Gordon. Albert Bierstadt Painter of the American West. Harrison House 1988.
