Provenance

Private Collection, ca. 1920s

Born near Düsseldorf, Germany, Albert Bierstadt was raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, from the age of two. In 1854 he returned to Düsseldorf for three years of art study, sharing a studio with fellow American painter Worthington Whittredge. During his time in Europe he went on a sketching tour of Italy, accompanied for the majority of the time by Sanford Robinson Gifford. After his return to the United States in 1857, Bierstadt settled in New Bedford, painting the landscape near his hometown and in the region of New Hampshire's White Mountains.

A shift in his career occurred in 1859, when Bierstadt joined Frederick Lander's survey party forging their way west to the Rocky Mountains. From this point on, the majesty of the western landscape would be the focus of Bierstadt's work. Returning east in 1860, Bierstadt moved into the Tenth Street Studio Building, the new hub of artistic activity in New York. Other artists with studios in the building were Gifford, Whittredge, Emanuel Leutze, and Frederic Edwin Church, among others. Elected to the National Academy of Design in 1860, Bierstadt initiated a pattern of sketching excursions to the West that continued as far as California, combining his trip with stays in New York to complete canvases in the studio and promote his works.

Like his main rival, Church, Bierstadt increased his fame and fortune by producing large-scale, almost panoramic "Great Pictures" that would tour the country and be publicly exhibited for a fee. The subject of the new American frontier coupled with a hyper-realistic attention to detail made these works wonders, attracting many visitors. Occasionally, explanatory texts would be sold at the exhibitions, and visitors could purchase prints of the paintings by subscription. Bierstadt's well-known masterpieces The Rocky Mountains, Lander Peak's of 1863 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains of 1868 (Smithsonian American Art Museum) were first seen in this context.

Although Sea and Sky is a relatively small oil sketch, it communicates the monumentality of nature that was the theme of Bierstadt's large canvases. Notably, the work was likely one that drew great attention and praise during the twentieth century. As indicated by the scholars Nancy K. Anderson and Linda Ferber, Bierstadt's plein air sketches were more celebrated than his "grand nationalistic landscapes" during this era.^[1] Although small, innovative sketches such as Sea and Sky helped to revive Bierstadt's reputation in the twentieth century.

Sea and Sky perhaps presents Bierstadt at his most abstract, as the artist's use of color and tonality signals the exploration of these qualities. Gradations of blue mark the billowing clouds that hover above the figure, giving them a feeling of movement. Effortlessly passing from saturated to light tones of blue, Bierstadt's palette creates an upward sweep, adding visual interest to the scene. Mixtures of gray and white delineate the landscape, which appears to float in a delicate and airy haze. The interweaving of blues, whites, and grays unifies the composition, while the barely perceptible transitions between sea, sky, and land underscore the sublime effect of nature, as does the placement of the small figure in the middle foreground. Despite the all-encompassing impression created by the tonality of the scene, there is a tranquility in Sea and Sky that is heightened by the relatively calm water and the sunlight indicated by the crisp blue of the sky in the top left corner of the painting. Sea and Sky demonstrates Bierstadt's remarkable ability to use and explore formal elements in a way that conveys the varying moods of nature.

JD

Along with Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt was one of the best-known American landscape painters active in the 1860s and 1870s. His works are included in notable national collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.