El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California

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El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California

Artist Albert Bierstadt (American, 1830-1902)

Date1875

DimensionsPainting: 32 1/4 × 48 in. (81.9 × 121.9 cm)
Frame: 46 1/2 × 63 3/8 × 5 in. (118.1 × 161 × 12.7 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of Mr. and Mrs. Roy Rike

Object number

1959.18

Not on View

Label TextThe wonders of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas in California were largely known to Americans in the East through travelers’ accounts and photographs and paintings by intrepid artists. Though not the first artist to paint these mountains, Albert Bierstadt’s majestic canvases spurred tourism to the West and helped spark the movement to preserve national lands. Bierstadt’s views of the monumental cliff face of El Capitan helped make this the most recognized site in California’s Yosemite Valley (Ahwahnee Valley). Landscape scenes like this, painted in the artist’s studio but based on sketches made during journeys to the West, were popular with art collectors in America’s urban centers. Such paintings created a vision for city dwellers of a vast, untamed American wilderness, providing a sense of identity for the young nation. However, these areas eventually preserved as National Parks were not undiscovered or uninhabited before visited by expeditions, gold-seekers, and tourists from the eastern U.S. Yosemite Valley’s Ahwahneechee people had been forcibly and violently removed when the valley was “discovered” by state militias in 1851. A few never left, and others later returned to their ancestral home before again being forced to leave by the U.S. government in 1969.Published References"Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, July-September, 1959," Art Quarterly, vol. 22, 1959, p. 386.

Trump, R., "Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963, no. 70.

Hendricks, G., "The First Three Western Journeys of Albert Bierstadt," The Art Bulletin, XLVI, Sept. 1964, p. 359, no. 147.

Rogers, Millard F., "Painting the particular place," The Toledo Museum of Art Museum News, vol. 8, no. 2, Summer 1965, p. 28, repr. p. 29.

A Guide to the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, 1966, repr.

Young, Mahonri Sharp, "From howling wilderness to Queensborough Bridge," Apollo, vol. 86, no. 70, Dec. 1967, p. 500, repr. fig. 11, p. 501.

Wittmann, Otto, "The Yosemite then and now," Country Life, vol. 159, no. 4109, April 1, 1976, p. 821, repr.

Cock, E., The Influence of Photography on American Landscape Painting, 1839-1880, New York, 1977 (Garland reprint of Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1967), I, pp. 94-95; II, pl. 17.

Lindquist-Cook, E., "Stereo-scopic Photography and the Western Paintings of Albert Bierstadt," Art Quarterly, XXXIII, no. 4, 1970, pp. 374-375, fig. 16.

Hendricks, G., Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West, New York, 1974, p. 242, fig. 182, no. CL-191.

Sweeney, J., "The Artist-Explorers of the American West: 1860-1880," unpublished Ph.D. dissertations, Indiana University, 1975, pp. 246-251, illus. 54, 55 (det.), 56 (det.).

Dickson, Harold E., "Camera and Canvas," History of Photography, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 1978, repr. p. 95.

Toledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, American Paintings, Toledo, 1979, p. 24, pl. 43.

Verlag, Michael Imhof, Die Dusseldorfer Malerschule und ihre internationale Ausstrahlung 1819-1918, Band 2-Katalog, Museum Kunstpalast, 2011. p. 379 (repr) fig. 319.

Exhibition HistorySanta Barbara Museum of Art, Work of Albert Bierstadt, 1964, no. 63 (cat. by G. Hendricks).

Toledo Museum of Art, Heritage and Horizon: American Painting 1776-1976, 1976, no. 14, repr.

New York, IBM Gallery of Science and Art, American Paintings from the Toledo Museum of Art, 1986.

Vienna, Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, America: the New World in 19th-Century Paitning, 1999, p. 48, pl. 51 (col.) p. 101.

Jackson, Mississippi Museum of Art; Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art; Toledo Museum of Art, The American West: Out of Myth, Into Reality, 2000, p. 70, fig. 19, p. 42 (col.).

Düsseldorf, Germany, Museum Kunst Palast, The Düsseldorf School of Painting – Crossing Bridges Between Cultures, September 23, 2011 – January 22, 2012, cat #319, pp. 379, repr. (col.) p. 379