Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite Valley

Bierstadt first visited Yosemite in 1863, returning several times through the 1870s as the valley was becoming the defining symbol of American wilderness and, with the Yosemite Grant of 1864, the first federally protected landscape in United States history. His large Yosemite canvases were made at a moment when the nation was recovering from the Civil War and reaching westward for a new sense of identity: the sublime scale of the Sierra became, in his hands, an argument for the spiritual and moral worth of the American continent. Working in the tradition of the Hudson River School, Bierstadt combined the luminist preoccupation with light as carrier of meaning with a European Romantic appetite for the grandiose, trained during his studies in Dusseldorf in the 1850s. His Yosemite paintings were exhibited to packed audiences in New York and London and commanded prices that no American painter had previously achieved, making him one of the most celebrated artists of the Gilded Age. The works were instrumental in building public and congressional support for the preservation of western lands.