Document Type
Article
Abstract
In the Pacific Northwest we encounter images of the American West as place of utmost grandeur, i.e., picturesque images of spectacular Western landscapes that have circulated throughout history in specific ways that I wish to explore. These images of the American West - adopted, among others, by environmental organizations and the tourist industry - were, to some extent at least, shaped artistically by German-American painter Albert Bierstadt who lived and worked in the latter half of the nineteenth century and who was one of the first artists after the first generation of expedition painters who traveled West repeatedly and transformed what he saw into memorable scenes for his contemporaries in America and abroad. These artists established an important tradition of representing Western scenes that Bierstadt was familiar with and acknowledges in his paintings but transforms into very powerful dialectical images. I will argue that Bierstadt worked at the cusp of the trajectory that transformed early images of the American West as a sublime space to a mode of representation that is much more indebted to contemporary European models of landscape painting and that frames these images in picturesque ways.
Repository Citation
Wilke, Sabine. "Albert Bierstadt's Images of the American West: An Eco-Critical Reflection on Nature Painting." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss2/12