Selling the Wilderness
Albert Bierstadt did not paint the American West because he wanted to preserve its truth. He painted it because he knew exactly what the rich men back East wanted to buy. It was 1859 and the myth of the frontier was already a lucrative business.
He packed up his gear and hitched a ride with a government survey team. He needed them to keep him from getting killed in the middle of nowhere. Bierstadt stood out there in the dirt and made oil sketches on paper. He also dragged along stereoscopic photography equipment to capture the brutal vastness of the terrain. But what he saw with his own eyes was not quite grand enough to sell.
He took those raw materials back to the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. That is where the real magic happened. Bierstadt mounted his paper sketches onto canvas and started lying. He invented dramatic light that never existed in nature. He bathed the Wind River landscape in a golden theatrical glow that screamed of manifest destiny and untouched paradise.
The eastern buyers ate it up. They crowded into his studio and paid massive sums for a wilderness they would never have to survive themselves. Bierstadt gave them an aggressive fantasy. He took a 12 by 16 inch scrap of the real West and turned it into an expensive dream.
References
Anderson, Nancy K. Albert Bierstadt Art and Enterprise. New York: Hudson Hills Press 1990.
Hendricks, Gordon. Albert Bierstadt Painter of the American West. New York: Harrison House 1988.
