MURA · THE COLLECTION · ALBERT BIERSTADT

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak

Albert Bierstadt's 1863 painting of Lander's Peak in the Wyoming Range, with a Shoshone encampment in the foreground, made from sketches taken on a survey expedition in 1859. The canvas, 186.7 by 306.7 centimetres, has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1907. It sold in 1865 for $25,000, then the most ever paid for an American painting.

Albert Bierstadt · 1863 · Oil on canvas · Romanticism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

Wikipedia describes the scene: "Sharply pointed granite peaks and fantastically illuminated clouds float above a tranquil, wooded genre scene." Lander's Peak rises to 10,456 feet; it was named after Frederick W. Lander, at Bierstadt's initiative, after Lander's death in the Civil War. The foreground is dominated by a band of Shoshone people, whom Bierstadt placed, in the words of the scholar Matthew Baigell, "in the middle distance so that we witness their presence in a landscape setting rather than focus on their movements". The landscape is not the terrain as it stands but an ideal arrangement altered for effect. Mura's catalogue describes a luminous mountain range above a lake and an encampment in the valley.

How it was painted

Bierstadt (1830–1902), born in Solingen and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, joined the survey party led by Colonel Frederick W. Lander in the spring of 1859 and travelled as far as the Wyoming Range, calling the Rockies "the best material for the artist in the world". He habitually made as many as fifty sketches for a single painting. In a letter of 10 July 1859, published in "The Crayon", he wrote of the Shoshone: "now is the time to paint them, for they are rapidly passing away". The finished canvas was shown in 1863 at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where Bierstadt had a studio; it was the first of his pictures promoted with a single-painting exhibition, a pamphlet, engravings and a tour. It won a prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.

Where it went

The British railway entrepreneur James McHenry bought the painting in 1865 for $25,000. Bierstadt later repurchased it and gave or sold it to his brother Edward, before the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it in 1907 through the Rogers Fund, accession number 07.123. At the Metropolitan Fair of 1864 it was hung opposite Church's "The Heart of the Andes", and the two are still shown on facing walls in Gallery 760 of the American Wing.

Why it is in Mura

It sits in the Coast & Countryside collection with the mood "majestic": a ten-foot canvas made for exhibition halls and millionaires' houses, now at home on an ordinary living-room wall.