Bierstadt paintings in the Haggin Museum - Haggin Museum, Stockton, California

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Alfred C. Jr. Harrison

Despite its realistic appearance, Dogwood contains a subtle allegorical program. Branches from trees on both sides of the composition form a Gothic arch, and the light that filters down through the forest canopy, reflecting off red and yellow autumn leaves, resembles the light streaming through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral. In his works of the 1860s Bierstadt would have emphasized the allegory by introducing artificial motifs. Perhaps heeding his critics, the artist wisely modified this tendency in paintings such as Dogwood.

Forest Monarchs (Pl. XIII), called Woodland Landscape with Deer in the 1929 Haggin inventory, demonstrates that Bierstadt was sensitive to the popularity of Barbizon compositions. With its broadly painted open foreground giving way to a grove of old oak trees in the middle ground, this painting in its formal structure resembles a late work by George Inness or William Keith (1838-1911). In every other aspect, it lacks Barbizon feeling. The careful transcription of nature observed, including such realistic details as bark peeling off trees and greener grass bordering the creek, is not typical of Barbizon style, nor is the preternaturally bright tonality. This is a panorama of California scenery in its pristine state. No evidence of man's presence can be found. Deer, rather than the domestic animals found in Barbizon paintings, provide warm color accents that blend with the meadows and tree trunks.

Recent scholarship has characterized Bierstadt as an artist-entrepreneur whose paintings pandered to the expectations of the art market. But even in works like Forest Monarchs that responded to prevailing fashions in art, he remained true to his own vision. In the 1860s his occasional melodramatic excesses were generally forgiven, but after about 1875 his contemporaries could only see his faults, failing to recognize that he often painted landscapes of extraordinary quality, as those in the Haggin Museum plainly demonstrate.

1 The painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Major works about Bierstadt include Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt Painter of the American West (Harry N. Abrams, New York, in association with the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, 1974); and Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1990). I would like to thank Nancy K. Anderson and William H. Gerdts for their generous assistance in consulting their research files on my behalf.

2 For an extended discussion of these issues, see Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, pp. 21-64.

3 September 2, 1886. The painting is unlocated.

4 See Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 61.

5 Patricia B. Sanders, The Haggin Collection (Haggin Museum, Stockton, California, 1991), pp. 13-20.

6 August 1868, p. 159, quoted in Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt, p. 207.

7 See, for example, Cole's Expulsion - Moon and Firelight of 1827-1828 (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) in which a flood of orange light shines from the gates of Eden in much the same way the sunset enters Yosemite Valley in Bierstadt's painting.