Mount Starr King, Yosemite
Albert Bierstadt (American, born Prussia [now Germany], 1830–1902)
1866
- Medium
- oil on canvas on panel-back stretcher
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 135.3 x 181 x 15.6 cm (53 1/4 x 71 1/4 x 6 1/8 in.); Unframed: 97 x 142.3 cm (38 3/16 x 56 in.)
- Culture
- America
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
During the summer of 1863, Bierstadt visited Yosemite Valley in California and made numerous sketches. Back in his New York studio, he used them to produce many majestic paintings, including this view of the distant granite peak Mount Starr King. Such scenes thrilled East Coast audiences and helped encourage early movements to safeguard natural wonders. In 1864, President Lincoln signed a bill preserving Yosemite as public property; it became a national park in 1890.
Bierstadt included two Native Americans with a packhorse in his composition, and their presence references the fact that Indigenous peoples had inhabited or seasonally visited the region for millennia. Over time, various government and military agencies dispossessed them of these ancestral lands. Although no longer residents in the national park, descendants of the seven Indigenous nations with ties to Yosemite persevered to live in neighboring areas.
