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Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALBERT BIERSTADT (1830-1902) Mountain Scene ...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:140,000.00 - 180,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection ALBERT BIERSTADT (1830-1902) Mountain Scene ...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
ALBERT BIERSTADT
(1830-1902)
Mountain Scene
signed with monogrammed initials "ABierstadt" (lower left)
oil on canvas
22 x 30 5/8 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm)
painted circa 1870s <p> Estimate: $140,000-180,000 <p> Provenance
Mrs. Frank Cotton, East Orange, New Jersey B. Douglas Orton, Montclair, New Jersey Mrs. Linton Koller, Montclair, New Jersey, 1978 Private Collection, Rhinebeck, New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, 1980 Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1980 <p> Exhibited
Morristown, New Jersey, Morris Museum of Arts and Sciences, American Art Treasures Discovered, 1977, no 55 (illustrated as Landscape-Snow Capped Peak Overlooking Rocky Mountain Scene) New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, Nineteenth Century Landscape Painting and the American Site, 1980, no. 3 (illustrated as View in Yosemite Valley) Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 12 <p> Literature
Barbara Novak, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Nineteenth-Century American Painting, London, 1986, p. 212, no. 67 (illustrated, p. 213) <p> Albert Bierstadt's Mountain Scene epitomizes his mature work. For decades during the nineteenth century, American and European writers associated Bierstadt with "high mountains."1 Reviewing a local art exhibit for a New York newspaper in December 1862, Bierstadt's friend and future (in 1863) traveling companion to the American West, author and lecturer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, praised a small painting of a Swiss lake (unlocated) contributed by the artist. The depicted scene, Ludlow mused, was: "bastioned by those giant mountains which Bierstadt's pencil ever delights in scaling, and bathed by the clear pure, bracing air in which his genius breathes freest. Bierstadt has a feeling for mountains, which leads one to suspect that in some former metempsychosis he must have been a mountain himself. The whole tone and aerial perspective of the present picture is such as would be felt by a man who lived in high, pure air."2 <p> Thirty-two years later, captioning Bierstadt's large canvas, Mount Corcoran, 1877 (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), for a book of art masterpieces published internationally in 1894, a sympathetic anonymous writer waxed poetic: <p> "...America is rich in great mountains.... It is not surprising that mountains have always exercised a powerful fascination. Perceived under conditions of changing atmosphere, now consumed by brilliant sunlight, now veiled by passing shadows of clouds that hasten across the distances, covered by their eternal white mantles of snow and ice, sometimes clothed in crimson dawn or in twilight, or yet dozing beneath the soft rays of the moon, their myriad charms defy all description."3 <p> The physiological analogy proffered by Ludlow makes sense for Bierstadt. Bierstadt possessed, first of all, robust mental and physical energies. To that extent his art followed his life. Upbeat, diligent, restive, and (in adulthood) irrepressibly gregarious, he seldom succumbed to fatigue, much less to despair. He savored the pursuit of distant goals, whether scenic vistas, wild animals, public praise, moneyed patrons, or physical health for loved ones and himself. While his artistic tastes often ran to amplitude, copiousness, and caprice, they shrank from grotesqueness and morbidity. <p>Like his compatriots Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Moran, Bierstadt was activated by scientific and territorial expansions of his day, and their investigative mechanisms. For the most part, however, his travels and the paintings he produced from them inclined toward mytho-poetic - that is, emotional - values more than rationalist ones. Eyewitness observation was key, but studio creativity was the nexus of what he did as an artist. Sentiment, in the nineteenth-century sense of the word, prevails in Bierstadt's studio works. The parable of the Americas as Eden, the allegory of North American Manifest Destiny, the supposed curative powers of mountains, and the naiveté of childhood fantasy, are all operative in them. <p>Mountain Scene loosely suggests the American West - where Bierstadt traveled several times starting in 1859 - and more firmly the European Alps - which he traversed in the mid-1850s and revisited three times starting in 1867. <p>We are grateful to Dr. Gerald Carr for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 The phrase was used by George W. Curtis in a review of Bierstadt's Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863, for the New York Daily Tribune, March 12, 1864, pp. 9-10. 2 Fitz Hugh Ludlow, "The Artists' Fund Exhibition," Leader, New York, December 20, 1862, p. 2. 3 Great Paintings of All Countries. Over Four Hundred Photographic Reproductions of Great Paintings Embracing Masterpieces of Modern American, French, English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Austrian, Russian, Belgian, Scandinavian, and Italian Art, Including more than One Hundred and Forty of the Greatest Paintings Exhibited in the Department of Fine Arts at the World's Columbian Exposition, New York, Bryan Taylor, 1894, p. 210. I cited a French edition of the book, Les tableaux célèbres du monde, in my essay, "Albert Bierstadt: A Larger Perspective," in Bierstadt's West, exh. cat., Gerald Peters Gallery, New York, 1997).
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