Canadian Rockies, Lake Louise

Bierstadt first visited Lake Louise in 1889 during an extended journey through the Canadian Rockies, invited west by the Canadian Pacific Railway as part of a broader effort to promote the scenic grandeur of the newly opened transcontinental corridor. By this point Bierstadt was the foremost practitioner of Hudson River School grand-manner landscape painting, though critical fashion in New York had already begun to turn against his large-scale theatrical canvases in favour of the intimate, broken-touch work of the emerging Impressionist generation. The Canadian Rockies pictures represent his late determination to find new wilderness equal in drama to the Yosemite and Sierra Nevada subjects that had made his reputation in the 1860s. Lake Louise offered exactly the luminous, glacially fed water he needed: its famous milky turquoise tone, caused by glacial rock flour in suspension, suited his interest in water as a vehicle for coloured light. These Canadian works were exhibited to considerable public admiration even as the critical establishment cooled toward him, and they stand today as among his most atmospherically refined achievements, the brushwork tighter and more restrained than in his monumental American West canvases yet the sense of sublime scale fully intact.