Indians in Council, California

Bierstadt made his first journey to Yosemite Valley in 1863, and his paintings of the region made him the most celebrated landscapist in America for the following decade. Indians in Council, California belongs to a series of works in which he integrated the Indigenous inhabitants of the valley into compositions that were already famous for their sublime grandeur. This was a deliberate artistic and political choice: by placing the Ahwahneechee people within the same frame as the eternal cliffs, Bierstadt argued visually for a continuity between land and people that was already being severed by federal removal policy. The painting was created at a pivotal moment, as the Hudson River School tradition of luminous American wilderness painting reached its commercial and critical apex just before Impressionism arrived from France and began to erode its authority. Critics who championed Bierstadt admired his capacity to make the American West legible to Eastern and European audiences as a place of mythic scale. The painting has been associated with collections on both coasts and reflects the artist's practice of combining field sketches made on site with studio elaboration on a grander scale.