“Sundown at Yosemite”
This glowing oil on canvas painting, titled “Sundown at Yosemite”, is by the German American artist, Albert Bierstadt, and dates to 1863. Bierstadt was an artist who lived from 1830 to 1902 who was part of the Hudson River and Rocky Mountain Schools of art.
The Yosemite Valley was a fairly recent “discovery”, having just only been accessed by explorers in 1855. Word got out of the immense beauty of this valley, and 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, and his second out to see the west. He made the journey with the American 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, and this one in particular, imbue the luminism art style through the soft, warm glow of infusing light he was able to render with his brush. The United States was in the middle of its Civil War and the dark thoughts of reality were kept at bay with the idea of “Manifest Destiny” 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 this 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.
