Focus on The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak and analyze the Reception.
Lander's Peak was an immediate success; twelve hundred people were invited to the exhibition, and almost a thousand showed up. Bierstadt was a shrewd self-promoter and a gifted artist, and this was the first of his paintings to be widely promoted with a single-picture exhibition accompanied by a pamphlet, engravings, and a tour. The painting, with its ten-foot width, was intended both for exhibition halls and the homes of America's emergent millionaire class. In 1865, British railway entrepreneur James McHenry purchased the work for $25,000, the most paid for an American painting to that point. Bierstadt later repurchased it, and gave or sold it to his brother Edward, before it was eventually acquired for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1907.Comparisons were made between Lander's Peak and The Heart of the Andes, a contemporary painting by one of Bierstadt's main rivals in the landscape genre, Frederic Edwin Church. The two works represented the two great mountain ranges spanning North and South America. At the New York Metropolitan Fair in 1864, held by the United States Sanitary Commission to raise money for the Union war effort, the two paintings were exhibited opposite each other. Lander's Peak and The Heart of the Andes are still exhibited on opposite walls at their current location at the Metropolitan.Most reviews of the painting were positive; one review called it "beyond question one of the finest landscapes ever painted in this country", adding, "Its artistic merits are in some respects unrivaled: and added to these it has the advantage of being a representative painting of a portion of the most sublime and beautiful scenery on the American Continent." The painting won a prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. At the same time, there were also critical voices; in particular, some American Pre-Raphaelites found his brushwork wanting. One such critic complained that it would have been better "if the marks of the brush had, by dexterous handling, been made to stand for scrap and fissure, crag and cranny, but as it is, we have only too little geology and too much bristle."
landscape The Heart of the Andes Frederic Edwin Church Lander's Peak American Pre-Raphaelites Union United States Sanitary Commission Exposition Universelle Metropolitan Museum of Art