“Sundown at Yosemite”
Evening glow.
“Sundown at Yosemite” is a beautiful oil on canvas painting by the German American artist, Albert Bierstadt, from 1863. Bierstadt was an artist who was prominent in both the Hudson River and Rocky Mountain Schools of art.
The Yosemite Valley was a fairly recent “discovery”, having just been accessed by explorers in 1855. Word soon spread of the immense beauty of this valley, and both tourists and adventurers started making their way there.
“Sundown at Yosemite” is one of many oil sketches that Bierstadt painted during his first trip to Yosemite in 1863. It was his second trip to the American West to work. He made the journey with author, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and the two stayed out for seven weeks. Bierstadt’s paintings of Yosemite Valley were so well-received, that most every explorer during the great westward expansion requested his companionship for his ability to document their adventures.
Bierstadt was in the peak of his career as one of the preeminent landscape painters in 1863. His paintings imbue the luminism art style through the soft, warm glow of infusing light that he was able to render with his brush. The United States was in the middle of its Civil War, and many looked to the west with the hopes of a brand-new start. The idea of “Manifest Destiny” became popular in which the American settlers believed it was their destiny to expand across the entire North American continent. Bierstadt’s gorgeous paintings of the newly explored west helped fuel the romanticism behind that ideology.
“Sundown at Yosemite” is currently on display at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain.
For more on Albert Bierstadt, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
