Storm in the Rocky Mountains

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie by Albert Bierstadt

In Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, the brightest part of the landscape lies immediately beneath the darkest clouds. Sunlight catches the cliffs and spreads across a mountain lake, while a blue-black mass of weather advances above it. The snow-covered summits seem almost suspended in the upper sky. Finished in 1866, this enormous oil painting belongs to the Brooklyn Museum and measures 210.8 × 361.3 cm: more than three and a half metres across.^[1]

That breadth allows several kinds of looking. From a distance, the painting presents an overwhelming collision of light, rock and cloud. Up close, it offers flowers, clear water, birds and small signs of human activity. Its drama grows from the relationship between these scales: immense threats above, individually legible lives below.

Annotated Details from A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Use the numbered details to explore how Bierstadt builds this scene from light, scale and overlapping forms. Image: Public domain reproduction via Rawpixel (CC0). Image source.

Details from A STORM IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, MT. ROSALIE

Compare these enlarged passages with their positions in the full painting.

1

The gathering storm

Look at the transitions between the dark clouds and the lighter sky. Their overlapping masses make the weather feel larger than the mountains.

2

Sunlight across the cliffs

Follow the illuminated rock faces towards the water. These patches of light separate successive slopes within an otherwise shadowed landscape.

3

Small figures beneath the landscape

Find the tiny figures and animals in the foreground. Their size makes the surrounding trees, rocks and mountains feel immense.

Looking into the storm

The clouds occupy the opening between two steep walls of rock. On the left, pale cliffs lead down towards the lake; on the right, a much darker mountain shoulder rises towards the upper edge. This asymmetry makes the storm feel as though it is moving into a space already enclosed by the mountains. A central cloud swells upwards in rounded towers, with delicate light around its edges. Below, the gathering darkness obscures the connection between the distant peaks and the valley floor.

The eye can follow the lake’s horizontal strip of light before climbing the illuminated slopes on the right. Waterfalls pull it down again. These competing directions give the landscape movement without making every part equally restless. Near the lower right corner, a small pool sits beneath a cascade, surrounded by plants and rounded stones. It invites the sort of patient inspection that the sky seems to interrupt.

Gerald L. Carr’s catalogue account identifies an exhibition leaflet circulated in 1866–67, much of whose text survives through a contemporary newspaper reprint. It described details that are easily lost in a small reproduction: flowers and ferns around the pool, fish in its water, a variety of trees, and startled ptarmigan seeking shelter. Carr also points out a bear beyond the birds and deer moving through the landscape. These incidents make the approaching storm something that living creatures must respond to, rather than a display of clouds alone.^[2]

Near the lower centre, Native figures and horses move across the open ground. The period description, as transmitted by Carr, connects them with abandoned hunting and camping equipment, including a slain deer and the embers of a fire. Farther left, a settlement occupies the valley near a stream. The painting therefore contains habitation and activity throughout its foreground. The small scale of these figures makes them vulnerable within the spectacle, but the landscape is not empty.^[2]

Some of the most compelling details resist the storm’s momentum. The pool is sheltered and quiet; the distant lake remains luminous beneath dark clouds; individual flowers retain their colour. Carr observes that the pool can seem almost like another picture when considered in isolation, yet its tranquillity answers the light-filled lake in the middle distance. A nineteenth-century reviewer questioned the contrast between wind-tossed trees and unruffled water. The tension remains visible today: Bierstadt asks the viewer to accept moments of stillness and disturbance within one panoramic scene.^[2]

Mountain weather and pictorial drama

Mountains can help produce the weather that makes them difficult to see. The National Weather Service identifies moisture, lift and atmospheric instability as the basic ingredients of thunderstorms. Mountain slopes can force moist air upwards; as it rises and cools, cloud formation can follow.^[3] This gives a general physical context for Bierstadt's association of towering terrain and building clouds, without reconstructing the conditions of his 1863 excursion from a painting.

The picture is especially effective at making the air seem three-dimensional. Light traces the rounded edges of the central cloud, while its lower mass sinks into darkness. The cloud seems to occupy the valley opening rather than sit on a distant backdrop. Near the upper left, pale snow peaks rise above a low band of cloud; on the right, a sheer rock silhouette is cut against brighter sky. Solid mountain and moving atmosphere continually change places as the more commanding presence.

That relationship also creates uncertainty about distance. We can follow a lit slope towards the lake, then lose its continuation under shadow. A cloud obscures the connections that would ordinarily let us read the terrain as a continuous surface. The painting's weather becomes an interruption in our knowledge of the landscape as well as a threat to its inhabitants.

Meteorology cannot settle the picture's artistic choices. A cloud's painted outline does not provide measurements of wind, temperature or rainfall, and the image alone does not establish a particular category of severe storm. Bierstadt brings different surfaces under contrasting illumination to make a moment of change legible. The combination of sheltered water, swaying trees and obscured mountains is compelling because the whole scene has not yet reached one condition.

The Colorado journey behind the painting

The painting grew from Bierstadt’s second western journey in 1863. In June he made a four-day excursion to the Chicago Lakes region of Colorado, southwest of Denver, guided by William Newton Byers, editor of the Rocky Mountain News. Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the writer who travelled west with Bierstadt, did not accompany this particular outing. The relevant eyewitness descriptions consequently come from Byers rather than Ludlow’s travel narrative.^[2]

Carr draws on research by Patricia Trenton and Peter Hassrick to connect the canvas with the Chicago Lakes landscape and with a storm recorded by Byers. This gives the picture a substantial basis in an encountered place. The artist’s sketches and the guide’s testimony matter, even though the finished composition was made later. Bierstadt began the large canvas in early 1865 and completed and unveiled it in New York the following year.^[2]

The interval between the journey and the painting left room for selection and reconstruction. Carr identifies California elements within the Colorado composition: cliffs and a wind-blown cascade recalling Yosemite, and snowy peaks and clouds suggestive of the Sierra Nevada. Forms from different western landscapes intensify a particular mountain encounter. The title locates the subject, while the canvas enlarges that location into a landscape whose distances and weather feel barely containable.^[2]

The snow mountain’s name brings a private relationship into this public spectacle. Bierstadt called it Mount Rosalie in honour of Rosalie Ludlow, whom he married in 1866 after her divorce from Fitz Hugh Ludlow. The mountain subsequently known as Mount Evans was renamed Mount Blue Sky for federal use in September 2023. The historical painting title remains A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie.^[2][4]

The change from Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky also carries a history beyond mapmaking. The Department of the Interior's 2023 announcement connects former territorial governor John Evans with the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and records two nation-to-nation consultations in the renaming process.^[4] These details explain why the later name became contested; they do not establish that Bierstadt intended his 1866 painting as a response to the massacre.

Mount Rosalie records the artist's personal dedication, while Mount Blue Sky belongs to a public reconsideration of whose histories a geographical name honours. Keeping both contexts in view prevents the title from reducing the mountain to an episode in the painter's marriage. The people represented near the foreground also belong to a wider human history than their small role within the approaching weather can convey.

A companion to Lander’s Peak

Bierstadt’s earlier The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak of 1863 provides a revealing comparison. Both works place a richly populated foreground before a distant mountain landscape, and both expand western travel into a large studio painting. Their emotional pace differs. The earlier picture’s settled arrangement gives the viewer time to enter its valley. In A Storm, abrupt changes in illumination and the dense accumulation of cloud make that invitation unstable.^[2]

Carr describes the later picture as conceived at least partly as a complement to Lander’s Peak. The relationship eventually became literal: the two paintings were presented together during a private viewing for Queen Victoria at Osborne House in December 1867, and paired again at Thomas McLean’s London gallery. Seen together, they could offer contrasting experiences of western scenery, one comparatively still and the other charged with approaching danger.^[2]

Frederic Edwin Church offers another comparison. Carr relates Bierstadt’s near, highly detailed vegetation to Church’s Heart of the Andes, and the apparently unsupported snow peaks to Chimborazo. He also connects the atmospheric energy of A Storm with Church’s Rainy Season in the Tropics, completed in the same year. These relationships suggest a shared ambition to unite minute natural detail with an expansive view.^[2]

The painting as a public event

The work had a buyer before it was finished. In autumn 1865, the English railway magnate Thomas William Kennard purchased the canvas while it was underway for a reported sum of around $20,000. Coming after the $25,000 sale of Lander’s Peak, this was an exceptional financial success for Bierstadt. Carr connects that income with the completion of his Hudson River home, Malkasten, and the resources available for his subsequent European travels.^[2]

Its first exhibition, at New York’s Miner and Sommerville Gallery in February 1866, donated admission receipts to a children’s hospital. Praise and criticism nevertheless divided reviewers. In Carr’s account, detractors objected to showiness, distracting details and exaggerated excitement; supporters considered it grand, impressive and possibly Bierstadt’s finest achievement. Their disagreement turns on qualities still apparent in the canvas. A viewer may find the many small incidents absorbing, or feel that they compete with the monumental storm.^[2]

Further American exhibitions increased its public reach before its shipment to England. Beyond its London showings and the royal viewing, it appeared at the Paris Salon and Munich International Exposition in 1869, and the American Exhibition in London in 1887. McLean published a chromolithograph in 1869, extending the image’s circulation beyond audiences who could stand before the original. Carr records that the painting itself later disappeared from public attention until James Maroney rediscovered it in Britain in 1974.^[2]

Light, scale and the physical canvas

The storm’s painted light depends on the light falling on the picture. Conservators Lance Mayer and Gay Myers recount an anecdote, through Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, in which a viewer thought A Storm looked better under gaslight, but Bierstadt replied that daylight suited it better. Gas illumination made evening exhibitions possible in his period; this particular exchange shows that its convenience did not settle the question of how a painting should look.^[5]

Here the distinction is especially suggestive. Deep shadow contains trees, animals and rock surfaces that can disappear if the image is viewed too dimly, while glare can make those passages hard to read. A reproduction preserves the composition but changes its physical encounter: the flowers, hunters and birds that must be searched for in a small image occupy a much larger field on the actual canvas.

The painting’s size also affects its care. In a May 2017 announcement, the Brooklyn Museum proposed cleaning surface dirt and deposits from the canvas and its gesso and gilt frame in public view, scheduled for June and July that year. The museum explained that the work’s dimensions limited its manoeuvrability and noted an earlier extensive treatment in 1976. Its announcement offered visitors a chance to watch the forthcoming work, bringing the physical preservation of this vast landscape into the gallery.^[1]

A later challenge to the heroic landscape

Brooklyn Museum has also placed Bierstadt's landscape tradition in dialogue with Valerie Hegarty's Fallen Bierstadt (2007). Its published label describes the distressed, apparently decaying work as a challenge to the heroic tradition of landscape painting and the expansionist promise associated with Manifest Destiny. The label refers to A Storm hanging beside it.^[6] That wording records an exhibition relationship, rather than guaranteeing a current gallery arrangement.

The connection is broader than a direct copy of this canvas. In a 2009 museum account, Shelley Bernstein identifies North Carolina Museum of Art's Bridal Veil Falls as the inspiration for Hegarty's work.^[7] Fallen Bierstadt can therefore engage the tradition represented by A Storm without being a damaged version of the Brooklyn painting.

This dialogue changes the meaning of danger. In A Storm, clouds threaten a landscape whose details remain carefully composed and held together. In the museum's reading of Hegarty, damage reaches the image and the tradition it embodies. The encounter encourages viewers to consider how a convincing picture of western grandeur can also carry an unsettled account of the nation's expansion. Its visual achievement remains available to admire, while the histories attached to that achievement remain open to scrutiny.