Alaskan Coast Range

Bierstadt made his Alaskan journey in the summer of 1889 at the invitation of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company, producing dozens of studies that would fuel his studio production for years. By that point his Hudson River School panoramas of the American West had already secured and partly exhausted his celebrity: the Gilded Age collectors who had paid enormous sums for his Yosemite and Rocky Mountain canvases in the 1860s and 1870s were now turning toward the Impressionism arriving from Paris, and Bierstadt's reputation had entered a slow decline in the critical press. Alaska offered him a new frontier, both geographically and commercially, and the Coast Range compositions show him responding to a landscape that was, if anything, more primally sublime than the Sierra Nevada. The luminist handling of atmospheric depth, with its debt to the Dutch masters he had studied in Düsseldorf in the 1850s, remained his constant method even as taste shifted around him. Works from this Alaskan group are held in American institutional collections and have been exhibited as evidence of the breadth of the Hudson River School project, demonstrating that the movement's ambition extended to the last, least-charted reaches of the continent.