The Landing of Columbus

The Landing of Columbus by Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt makes Columbus’s landing a spectacle seen through trees. A European party gathers on a brightly lit beach, while Native figures occupy the shaded ground nearer the viewer. The ships wait beyond them in a calm bay. The version pictured here is identified as an 1893 oil on canvas from the City of Plainfield by Fundación Elkano’s Google Arts & Culture record. ^[1]

Landscape carries much of the story. The landing party occupies only a small part of the canvas, yet light and the opening between the trees give it exceptional prominence. Looking closely means attending both to that luminous centre and to the people whom Bierstadt places around its edges.

Looking from the trees toward the beach

The large tree at left establishes the viewer’s position. Its thick trunk rises out of the dark foreground, and its branches reach across the upper part of the painting. On the opposite side, slender palms lean into the opening. Together they form an irregular arch around the beach and water. The setting has depth and enclosure before the historical action comes into focus.

Bierstadt does not make the foreground uniformly dark. Warm light catches parts of the trunk and foliage; scattered pale stones interrupt the ground; small plants give the lower edge texture. These fragments keep the woodland legible while preserving the much stronger contrast with the open shore. The eye can linger among them, but it is repeatedly drawn back to the bright strip of sand.

There, the Europeans form a compact cluster of upright figures. Their red, gold and pale clothing concentrates colour within the opening. Small boats at the water’s edge connect the gathering to the ships offshore. The masts and rigging in the distance register as delicate verticals against the softer sky and water: the fleet is necessary to the narrative, but it does not compete with the beach for attention.

The Native figures are distributed differently. Some stand near the tree; others are lower to the ground closer to the illuminated shore. Their separation from the European cluster makes watching part of the picture’s action. It also gives the spectator two places from which to consider the landing: the sunlit centre where the Europeans assemble, and the shaded margin where people already on the island observe their arrival.

That arrangement complicates the landscape’s apparent tranquillity. The smooth water, warm foliage and expansive sky offer visual pleasure, while the distinction between the groups remains unmistakable. Bierstadt has organised an encounter through distance, light and the unequal visibility of its participants.

An 1893 painting of a 1492 event

Christie’s identifies the project as a four-hundredth-anniversary commemoration and the final large canvas as an intended entry for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition.^[2] This does not establish that the Plainfield version appeared at the fair. The subject belonged to a public celebration of European exploration.

The distinction between the event and its much later representation matters. Bierstadt constructed this shore centuries after the landing. Its carefully framed opening, emphatic illumination and ceremonial gathering tell us how he staged history for a nineteenth-century audience. They cannot establish the appearance of the actual encounter in 1492.

Calling the subject a “discovery” without qualification would also adopt the European viewpoint built into its commemoration. The island in Bierstadt’s own painting is inhabited. The Native figures make that fact visible, even as the composition directs attention toward the newcomers. European arrival is the event being celebrated; an already existing human world supplies its setting.

A familiar landing scene, seen from farther away

Bierstadt’s subject already had a prominent American precedent. John Vanderlyn’s Landing of Columbus, commissioned by Congress in 1836 and installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1847, makes the explorer and his companions dominate the foreground. The Architect of the Capitol identifies Columbus’s raised royal banner and sword as a claim for his Spanish patrons. Native observers remain at the wooded right edge. Vanderlyn’s composition also appeared on the two-cent Columbian commemorative stamp in 1893.^[3]

In that painting, large bodies, banners and weapons carry the ceremony; the wooded shore frames their actions. Bierstadt moves the European gathering farther away. From our position beneath the trees, we must look across a stretch of ground to reach it. The foreground thus acquires a presence that Vanderlyn’s crowded central group does not allow. Yet distance alone does not overturn the hierarchy: Bierstadt’s light still makes the newcomers the focal event. The comparison reveals different ways of directing attention within a shared commemorative subject, without establishing that Bierstadt copied Vanderlyn.

Studies for ships and shore

Preparation for the subject extended across different materials. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a Ship Study for the Landing of Columbus from a sketchbook, dated about 1891 and drawn in graphite on wove paper. ^[4] The sheet isolates a vessel: long, lightly drawn lines establish the masts and spars, while firmer marks define the hull and raised stern. A small boat appears alongside it. With almost no surrounding landscape, the drawing directs attention to the ship’s structure.

The drawing isolates a ship’s construction; the painting gives the distant vessels a role within a landscape. Their small forms explain the arrival and extend the eye across the bay. The comparison shows how concentrated study can serve a broader narrative, without demonstrating that Bierstadt copied a particular ship directly from this sheet.

Christie’s records an 1892 oil study on paper laid down on board, 35 × 48.3 cm. Its essay relates European study journeys to a subsequent visit to Watling Island in the Bahamas and proposes that the study was painted there.^[2] That probable location identifies preparation for the subject, rather than proving the historical landing site.

Ship and oil studies address structure and composition; the finished landscape gathers their detail into a drama organised through light and framing.

A sea already travelled

The distant European ships should also be considered within a longer maritime history. The National Museum of the American Indian’s Infinity of Nations account describes Native navigation in the Caribbean thousands of years before Columbus. The sea connected communities through exchanges of goods and ideas; Taíno societies had extensive links among islands before the Spanish arrival at Guanahani in 1492.^[5]

This changes what the bay can mean to a viewer. Bierstadt’s ships make European arrival visible, but the waters were already routes of communication. The people among the trees belong to that inhabited maritime world. Reading them solely as witnesses to somebody else’s voyage narrows their history to the moment selected by the painter. The museum’s account supplies regional context; it does not identify the depicted individuals or establish the accuracy of their clothing.

Three large versions

Christie’s distinguishes three large versions made in 1892–93: the Plainfield and Newark canvases, and a largest version destroyed in a fire at the American Museum of Natural History in 1960.^[2] That lost painting’s history must be kept apart from the surviving work reproduced here.

The Smithsonian’s American art inventory also records a Plainfield oil on canvas dated 1893 under the title Landing of Columbus at San Salvador. ^[6] Its entry corroborates the collection-partner identification of the work reproduced here. The loss of the largest canvas belongs to the history of the wider project.

A civic gift and a new exhibition setting

The Plainfield canvas acquired a public purpose beyond its original anniversary subject. The Historical Society of Plainfield’s Winter 2002 newsletter records Jonathan Ackerman Coles’s gift of The Landing of Columbus at San Salvador and Autumn in the Sierras to the city in 1919. It also documents their loan to Montclair Art Museum’s Primal Visions exhibition, with free admission for Plainfield residents and educational programmes for local pupils and teachers.^[7]

The exhibition gave the paintings an opportunity to be encountered together and discussed in a setting organised around interpretation. A civic collection was reaching audiences through a museum partnership. That history matters because public access involves more than possessing a work: the conditions in which it is shown affect what viewers can learn from it.

Crocker Art Museum’s published account of the same touring exhibition connected Bierstadt’s scenes of explorers with nineteenth-century beliefs about European entitlement to the continent. Contemporary responses by Peter Edlund and Kay WalkingStick addressed that imperial framework. Its ArtLetter also reported that Bierstadt withdrew the Columbus painting from the 1893 competition when he anticipated rejection.^[8] This retrospective account supports an intended fair entry followed by withdrawal; it supplies neither an original jury decision nor proof that the Plainfield canvas was exhibited there.

The 2002 presentation treated the Columbus subject as a construction of history open to criticism. A painting could be valued for its execution and historical significance while its distribution of attention remained a subject of disagreement.

Who occupies the centre of history?

The painting’s hierarchy is easiest to see by returning to the opening between the trees. The European party receives the clearest illumination and forms the most concentrated group. The Native figures occupy a more dispersed, shaded space. We can read this as a colonial ordering of the encounter: European arrival becomes the public event, while the island’s inhabitants become its surrounding witnesses.

The figures’ responses remain less certain than this visual hierarchy. Shade cannot tell us a person’s thoughts, and a crouching posture alone cannot establish submission, fear or welcome. The painting gives us a staging of the encounter, with its participants assigned different degrees of prominence.

The position offered to the viewer remains especially revealing. We look outward from near the Native figures, beneath the shelter of the trees, yet the light encourages us to attend to the Europeans. This makes the foreground more than decorative framing. It places people already on the island within our immediate field of vision while giving the newcomers the picture’s ceremonial focus. The beauty of the bay and the unequal distribution of attention operate together.

The Plainfield dispute

The meaning of public ownership became contentious again. In proceedings recorded by a New Jersey appellate decision of 20 July 2021, Plainfield sought permission to sell both paintings, arguing that the Columbus canvas’s racial implications made public display harmful and that proceeds could support community programmes. The court upheld refusal to modify the charitable trust. Its reasoning concerned Coles’s intention to give art for public enjoyment in his father’s memory; it also considered display elsewhere or donation to a museum as alternatives.^[9]

That decision did not resolve the painting’s interpretation. The court addressed the terms of the gift, while the city’s objections concerned what its display communicated. Preserving an artwork and endorsing the encounter it depicts are different choices. The dispute brings that distinction into the history of this particular canvas: beauty, historical importance and public responsibility can generate competing demands.

The lives represented at the painting’s shaded edge also extend beyond the scene. The National Museum of the American Indian’s 2018 Taíno exhibition challenged the idea that Caribbean Indigenous peoples disappeared after colonisation. It presented surviving heritage and contemporary community networks in the islands and their diasporas.^[10] That continuing history cannot be contained within a ceremonial image of first arrival. Returning to Bierstadt’s foreground with it in mind gives the figures a relationship to histories that the landing spectacle leaves outside its frame.