Albert Bierstadt German, American, 1830-1902
32.5 x 46.2 cm
Because Albert Bierstadt and his wife Rosalie made regular visits to their residence in Waterville, New York, the landscape of Oneida County was incorporated into the artist’s creative geography. Waterville Pond in Autumn, a vivid plein air study of early fall, was painted on family property according to an inscription on the back of the painting. The features of “Osborn land” are carefully observed rising beyond the pond in the foreground to the rail fences in the distance separating wooded from cultivated land where livestock graze. Bierstadt depicts a modern pastorale in the tradition of English painter John Constable’s tributes to his patrons’ estates. Like Constable, his record is accurate but more than merely topographical. No stately home is included in the view; yet this land reflects family history in the visible improvements of skilled husbandry as well as the promise of legacy represented by the acres around which the village would grow in the future.
In 1885, the artist would pay tribute to the region as well as the season in a monumental work: Autumn Woods, Oneida County, State of New York, 1886, intended for the 1887 American Exhibition in London. The subject was an astute choice for British audiences as quintessentially “American:” resonant of Thomas Cole’s observation in his Essay on American Scenery (1836): “There is one season when the American forest surpasses all the world in gorgeousness – that is the autumnal….from the most golden yellow to the intensest [sic]crimson." [1]
—Linda S. Ferber, excerpt from "Small but Sublime: Albert Bierstadt Cabinet Paintings and Oil Studies," 2024
[1] Richard J. Koke et al, American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society (New York: The New-York Historical Society in association with G. K. Hall, Boston: 1982), vol. 1: 45-46 and Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s.1 (January 1836) quoted in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley, University of California Press: 2009), 269.
Provenance
The artist; to
William Godfrey Mayer and Esther Luceta Osborn (the artist’s wife’s sister), Waterville, New York; to
Dr. Edward Randall and Harriet Ada Pauline Mayer (their daughter), Waterville, New York; to
Orville DeForest Edwards and Joyce Edwards (née Randall, their daughter, d. 2000), Dobbs Ferry, New York, until 2000; to
Mr. Orville DeForest Edwards, Dobbs Ferry, New York, 2000–2015;
By descent to private collection, 2015 until the present
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