Where the companion Yosemite canvas looks across the valley floor, this painting looks down it, the viewer positioned at an elevation that compresses the landscape into a luminous recession. The painter’s vantage point matters. From above, the valley becomes an argument about light as much as a record of a place, the atmospheric haze that softens the far walls reading as depth and illumination simultaneously. Bierstadt also understood nature to be a unified aesthetic and scientific whole, as did Church from his readings from the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. For Bierstadt as for Church, the most honest account of the American landscape would thus be at once scientific and ethereal.
Digital loan Courtesy of Birmingham Museum of Art, Gift of the Birmingham Public Library, 1991.879
