Drawings

Albert Bierstadt Drawings

A ship’s hull takes shape through a handful of firm pencil strokes. Long, lighter lines extend upwards into masts and rigging; a small boat sits beside the stern. In Albert Bierstadt’s Ship Study for the Landing of Columbus, the page remains mostly empty. The drawing isolates something the artist needed to understand before placing it within a much larger scene. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates this sketchbook sheet to about 1891 and identifies its medium as graphite on wove paper.^[1]

Bierstadt’s drawings bring us close to this practical work of looking, selecting and remembering. His large landscapes can seem astonishingly complete, but their preparation involved separate observations of terrain, people, animals and objects. Surviving sketchbooks and studies let us examine those observations at the scale of a page. They also reveal how many different things a “sketch” could be: a pencil outline, a painted head, a quick colour note or a carefully finished small picture.

What a sketchbook could hold

The ship study belongs to a leather-bound book with gilt-edged paper. The Met gives dimensions of 12.1 × 19.7 × 1.1 cm for the book; these describe the bound object, including its thickness, rather than the size of this individual drawing. The sheet is catalogued separately as 1995.379.3c recto.^[1] That distinction matters when viewing a page online: a drawing extracted from its sequence can look like an independent work, although it was made within a portable volume.

Another surviving example is the National Gallery of Art’s Sketchbook of 1881, a bound volume of forty-six graphite drawings. The museum associates it with individual sheets including studies of moose.^[2] A book could gather several kinds of observation within one physical object, allowing the artist to return to them later. Its sequence offers a different encounter from a single framed drawing: the reader can move between subjects and compare changes in attention.

The Columbus ship page concentrates on structure. The hull has more emphatic marks than the tall rigging, and repeated lines test its edges. There is little attempt to build a surrounding sea or sky. This economy makes the drawing useful to us as evidence of a focused task. Its relationship to the finished subject is preparatory; the exact adaptation of this vessel into a painted composition remains open.

Drawing while travelling

Travel supplied Bierstadt with opportunities to build such stores of material. Nancy Anderson’s National Gallery catalogue traces Lake Lucerne to sketches made during his Swiss journey of 1856, before he composed the large painting in New Bedford in 1857–58. She also describes his 1863 Yosemite studies and the paintings he developed after returning to New York.^[3] Fieldwork and studio work were connected across considerable distances and intervals of time.

Paper offered a manageable surface for recording an isolated detail or a larger arrangement. Bierstadt worked in both drawing and oil during his travels.^[3] Different materials answered different needs: graphite could register contours and relationships with relatively few marks, while oil could record colour and give a figure or landscape substantial modelling.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s account of their 1863 Yosemite journey makes this working life more concrete. In The Heart of the Continent, published in 1870, he describes the artists leaving camp with stools and colour boxes after breakfast, spending the day making colour studies, and showing their work to the party after returning in the evening. Lunch could be carried out to them. The day ended with food, conversation and brush cleaning.^[4] His account concerns the party’s routine, rather than the making of a particular surviving sheet, but it gives study a duration: the day’s observations were worked upon, carried back and looked at again.

That evening review puts an apparently private sketch within a shared setting. Companions could see what the artists had selected from the day’s landscape. The routine also complicates the idea of an instant impression: a day spent studying a place was followed by further consideration in camp. Animals, equipment and another person carrying food helped sustain that work. The brevity of the marks on a page cannot by itself measure how long the artist watched or worked. Ludlow’s enthusiastic praise of painting on the spot belongs to his account of the party; the date, place and later use of each surviving study require separate evidence.

People observed at Fort Laramie

Studies of Native American Leaders Made at Fort Laramie, about 1859, combines oil and graphite on paper. Measuring 33 × 42.9 cm, the sheet carries four painted heads, names written beneath them and a faint additional pencil sketch near the upper right. Three men turn towards the left; the lower figure is seen more frontally. Dark hair, differently shaped faces and the folds of red or muted clothing give each study its own character.^[5]

Bierstadt reached Fort Laramie with Frederick W. Lander’s expedition in June 1859, during tense relations between the Lakota and the United States government. The Met identifies the sitters as four Lakota leaders.^[5] The written names preserve an effort to distinguish individuals within a practice often remembered chiefly for its mountains.

The Met proposes that several male figures at the lower right of the later The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak may have been inspired by these studies.^[5] The finished painting’s foreground encampment is identified as Shoshone.^[6] This possible adaptation of particular figure studies into a composed scene leaves the identities of the Lakota sitters distinct from that of the painted community.

A tree study in oil

The Met’s Study of a Tree, about 1864, is an oil study on paper mounted on board, measuring 23.5 × 20 cm.^[7] Its small size and concentrated subject make it useful beside the drawings, but its medium is paint. In the museum’s monochrome reproduction, a thick trunk fills much of the upright surface. Knots, projecting branches and irregular patches of light and dark receive more attention than the surrounding space. The tree has been treated as an individual form to examine closely.

This kind of restricted study helps explain the particularity of Bierstadt’s larger landscapes. A painter assembling a broad view could draw upon sustained attention to a trunk, a head or an animal. Here, we can appreciate that attention even while the study’s connection to any particular finished canvas remains uncertain.

Conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers describe a wide range of Bierstadt’s studies. In their discussion of Italian Costume Studies of 1857, they note how much blue paper remains exposed and how the paper’s texture breaks up some brushstrokes. Their account of a highly finished South Dome, Yosemite Valley shows another possibility: a small study with the whole surface painted and handling close to that of a finished picture. They leave the significance of its May 1867 inscription uncertain, including whether it marks a gift rather than the work’s execution.^[8] A small support made travel possible, while its date and circumstances of production still require separate evidence. Speed, scale and finish varied within his preparatory practice.

Photography and the studio

Drawing belonged to a wider world of image-making. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art holds St. Joseph, Missouri (Lander Expedition), an albumen stereograph dated about 1859 and credited to the Bierstadt Brothers. Its mount carries the printed name of their photographic business in New Bedford.^[9] This is a photographic object associated with the expedition’s setting; the collective credit does not identify Albert as the person who operated the camera.

The Hudson River Museum’s exhibition The Bierstadt Brothers: Painting and Photography distinguishes Albert’s paintings from photographs by his brothers Charles and Edward. Its examples include Charles’s stereographs and Edward’s artotypes, showing how the family’s work extended into the production and circulation of printed images.^[10]

Precisely how these resources met on an easel can remain difficult to establish. Mayer and Myers examine an 1859 stereograph showing Albert painting, with small square objects leaning against the canvas. They discuss two possibilities for those objects: photographic images or studies on paper.^[8] The photograph supplies evidence of the working setting while leaving that detail unresolved.

In the studio, observation remained open to revision. Technical examination of Lake Lucerne, reported in the National Gallery catalogue, found traces of probable pencil underdrawing and changes to the painted composition: a cliff became trees, a church was moved, and mountain profiles were altered.^[3] The large canvas records further decisions beyond those made in the field. Its carefully resolved surface conceals some of the searching process that the drawings leave visible.

Later sketchbooks: mountains and open water

The Met’s Mountain Landscape Near Canmore, dated 1890, shows how much landscape could be held in a lightly worked page. The drawing belongs to a later sketchbook and is catalogued as 1995.379.4j verso, graphite on wove paper.^[11] Its faint mountain outlines extend across the sheet. A tall tree rises near the left of centre, while a row of small, pointed marks indicates a belt of trees below the peaks. Broad areas remain unshaded; a handwritten place note sits near the bottom.

The eye can follow the mountain profiles without encountering the colour, cloud or elaborate modelling of a finished panorama. A few lines establish the relations between an immediate tree, a wooded slope and the higher range. The page records a structure that could be consulted later. Its spareness also makes the act of selection apparent: the mountains receive recognisable contours, while other parts of the setting are only lightly indicated. The museum’s place identification supplies a location, but the sheet alone does not establish a link to a named finished painting.

Study for Seascape, about 1891, belongs to the same Met sketchbook accession group as the Columbus ship study: this page is 1995.379.3p verso.^[12] The difference in attention is striking. Here a long horizontal line divides open water from the sky. Irregular, looping contours occupy much of the upper page, and diagonal strokes suggest a change of tone or light among them. The lower area is comparatively empty, apart from a few short horizontal marks and a small form near the horizon.

Beside the ship drawing, the seascape shows two tasks within a portable book. One page isolates a vessel’s construction; the other distributes sky and water across a broad view. The large untouched areas are part of their economy. Neither drawing attempts the surface finish of a canvas, and neither tells us how extensively its idea was later revised. Their shared book context lets us consider detail and composition together without treating every page as a step towards The Landing of Columbus.

These later sheets extend the account of Bierstadt’s practice beyond the expeditions of the 1850s and 1860s. Drawing continued to provide a way of keeping a place, form or arrangement available for further thought. Read alongside the oil studies, photographs and technical evidence from finished paintings, they reveal a working process with several kinds of record. The resources could overlap, while each preserved something different: contour, colour, a person’s appearance, a spatial relationship or a view to reconsider.