MURA · THE COLLECTION · ALBERT BIERSTADT

Mount Starr King, Yosemite

A view of the granite peak Mount Starr King in Yosemite, painted by Albert Bierstadt in 1866 from sketches made in California three years earlier. The canvas, 97 by 142.3 centimetres, is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, which bought it in 1922 for the Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection. It hangs in the museum's American landscape gallery.

Albert Bierstadt · 1866 · Oil on canvas on panel-back stretcher · Romanticism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

The museum writes: "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." Mura's catalogue describes shafts of light breaking through clouds above a wooded valley and its still water. The museum adds that "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", and that descendants of the seven Indigenous nations with ties to Yosemite live in neighbouring areas today.

How it was painted

Bierstadt (1830–1902) was born in Solingen, Prussia, and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts; he studied in Düsseldorf from 1853. According to Wikipedia, he travelled west in 1863 with the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow and spent seven weeks in the Yosemite Valley, and throughout the 1860s he used studies from that trip as the source for large exhibition paintings. This is one of them, worked up in New York on canvas mounted on a panel-back stretcher. The museum notes that 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, and it became a national park in 1890.

Where it went

Chester Guild Cutter (1852–1917) of Nyack, New York, bought the painting from the artist. It then belonged to Frank E. Marshall of Philadelphia and passed through the Vose Gallery in Boston, from which the Cleveland Museum of Art purchased it in 1922, accession number 1922.684. It had already hung in the museum's inaugural exhibition of 1916 as "Starr King Mountain, California". It is on view in Gallery 206, American Landscape.

Why it is in Mura

It sits in the Coast & Countryside collection with the mood "majestic": light, distance and weather on a scale the television was built for.