Two of the most fascinating works in the Osborn collection interpret Albert Bierstadt’s signature western terrains in contrasting modes. While both Mountain Landscape and View in the Sierras defy precise topographical identification, they clearly reference iconic features first encountered by the artist on his 1863 painting expeditions in the Yosemite Valley and the surrounding Sierra Nevada Mountains. These resonant sites would be portrayed with varying degrees of both topographical precision and romantic license for the rest of Bierstadt’s career.

For example, while Bierstadt assigned a regional title to View in the Sierras, another hand later identified the subject as Kings River Canyon. Indeed, a series of similar landscapes with varying titles and on different scales were painted in the later 1860s and 1870s testifying to the satisfaction of this particular landscape configuration. The deep park-like foreground with massive trees and grazing deer contained within a bowl of looming snowy peaks resonated for his audiences as it had for Bierstadt who wrote: “We are now here in the garden of Eden I call it. The most magnificent place I was ever in, and I employ every moment painting from nature.” The broad basin of shining water at the center of each version references the river named for Clarence King, the American geologist noted for his survey of the region. The most dramatic of these variations is Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), in which Bierstadt effectively swells the scale of our intimate cabinet painting to the size of a Great Picture. While the monumental version was, like many of the artist’s works, both admired and critiqued, nevertheless the painting was famous as an exercise in the venerable aesthetics of what we might call the “Beautiful Sublime.”

In contrast, Mountain Landscape although diminutive in size conveys a powerful vision of the Yosemite Valley-Sierra Nevada conflation of terrain as a gloomy region of forbidding danger invoking the opposing landscape mode of the “Terrible Sublime.” The palette is dark. The weather threatens. A torrent plunges headlong down a Yosemite-like sheer wall of granite on the left roiling the dark waters below. At the right snowmelt rushes from remote glacier fields among the high peaks along the facets of a massive ravine down to the waters below. Foreground boulders offer little support to the gnarled storm blasted tree gesturing in the lower right; a victim of nature’s forces over time and an actor in the terrible sublime right out of the landscapes of Thomas Cole. Bierstadt’s energetic application of paint to this tiny surface also contributes to the outsized impact of this tiny gem. Is this site on the map? Does it really matter?

—Linda S. Ferber, excerpt from "Small but Sublime: Albert Bierstadt Oil Studies and Cabinet Paintings," 2024