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Alaskan Coast Range
Albert Bierstadt (born Solingen, Germany 1830-died New York City 1902)
ca. 1889
- Medium
- oil on paper mounted on paperboard
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 13 7/8 x 19 3/8 in. (35.2 x 49.2 cm)
- Culture
- Alaska
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Orrin Wickersham June
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Albert Bierstadt traveled through western Canada in 1889 on the Canadian Pacific Railway. He headed to Alaska by steamer in search of "wild places in the mountains," but was shipwrecked in Loring Bay. He lived with the other passengers in Native American huts and filled two books with drawings and paintings of his surroundings. (Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, 1990) This painting of the Alaskan coastline is an oil sketch, probably done on the spot as a study for a later work. The cool colors and thin layers of paint evoke the raw atmosphere of the wilderness where Bierstadt found himself stranded.
