The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century

The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth CenturyThroughout the nineteenth century the Rockies inspired mixed emotions a paradoxical combination of spiritual response and emotional resistance. The towering earth forms were at once awesome, beautiful, and forbidding. It is understandable, then, that the chronicle of men's responses to the Rocky Mountains is a voluminous one. Every means of expression, every form of poetry and prose, has gone into the account; but it was the artists' vision that

Throughout the nineteenth century the Rockies inspired mixed emotions - a paradoxical combination of spiritual response and emotional resistance. The towering earth forms were at once awesome, beautiful, and forbidding. It is understandable, then, that the chronicle of men's responses to the Rocky Mountains is a voluminous one. Every means of expression, every form of poetry and prose, has gone into the account; but it was the artists' vision that finally revealed the full splendor, the commanding allure of the West.

Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the vast new territories acquired by the United States became a lure for artists from the eastern seaboard and from European countries. They followed government expeditions; they joined geological explorations; they participated in the excursions of sportsmen. They came to the Rockies with diverse backgrounds, different orientations, and varied painterly techniques, but they would all contribute to the country's growing awareness of the magnificent challenge, beauty, and opportunity of the West. This book focuses on those artists and those works - the product of a period of American history when the Rocky Mountains still embraced a vast, uncharted territory. In one comprehensive survey the authors have traced a broad overview of the development of landscape art in the Rocky Mountains from the works of early scientific-artist reporters on government expeditions to Albert Bierstadt's famous painting The Rocky Mountains (1863), which launched a grand march to the Rockies by professional artists, to the works of Frederic Remington, who sought to preserve a vision of the frontier before it vanished forever.