MURA · THE COLLECTION · ALBERT BIERSTADT

Among the Sierra Nevada, California

Among the Sierra Nevada, California is a very large oil painting by Albert Bierstadt from 1868, a composed view of mountains, waterfall and lake in the American West. It measures 183 by 305 centimetres and belongs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, accession number 1977.107.1.

Albert Bierstadt · 1868 · Oil on canvas · Romanticism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Sunlight opens through clouds above a mountain lake and a small gathering of deer. The museum lists the subjects as the Sierra Nevada mountains, a lake, a waterfall, deer and ducks; Wikipedia adds that a trout is hidden in the water, visible only on close inspection. Wikipedia also notes that Bierstadt painted the scene four years after he could have seen it, so the view is idealised rather than documentary.

How it was painted

Bierstadt had joined Frederick W. Lander's survey expedition west in 1859 and may have seen the Sierra Nevada on a journey in 1863. The canvas was painted in Europe in the winter of 1867 to 1868: the museum's label says it was created in London, while Wikipedia places it in his studio in Rome. It was first exhibited in London in the summer of 1868, then in Berlin, where it won a gold medal from the Royal Academy, and in Paris, Moscow and Saint Petersburg before reaching American audiences.

The museum's label is frank about his methods. Bierstadt's polished pictures met a strong demand for frontier imagery in the 1860s, and he combined ability with what one critic called a "vast machinery of advertisement and puffery": canvases in elaborate frames, shown in darkened rooms behind drapes and unveiled to applause. The label reads the painting as a projection of American natural beauty and artistic achievement to Europe during a period of heavy emigration.

Where it went

Wikipedia records the sale to the Boston collector Alvin Adams in 1869 and the purchase in 1873 by William Brown Dinsmore for The Locusts, his estate on the Hudson in Dutchess County, New York. There it stayed; at one point it was glued to an interior wall by his great-granddaughter, Helen Huntington Hull, and Smithsonian conservators spent some 600 hours restoring it. It came to the museum by her bequest, and the credit line records that Dinsmore acquired it in 1873 for the family estate. At the time of writing the museum lists it as not on view. The reproduction is the Google Art Project file on Wikimedia Commons.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Coast & Countryside collection with a majestic mood: a stage set of light and rock, made to be unveiled.