ALBERT BIERSTADT, Rocky Mountain, Big Horn Sheep

New York, Spanierman Gallery, The Spirit of America: American Art from 1829-1970, November 2002-February 2003, no. 4, illustrated in color

In 1876, Albert Bierstadt, an artist best known for his spectacular depictions of the unspoiled wilderness of the American frontier, accompanied the Earl of Dunraven on a trip to Colorado.  Dunraven, an Irish nobleman, had recently purchased a large portion of Estes Park and he commissioned Bierstadt to paint a view of his new property.  News of the expedition was heralded in the local paper, Rocky Mountain News, who reported on December 23^rd, 1876, that Bierstadt and Dunraven went to Estes Park “for the purpose of procuring sketches of winter scenery and effects in the high mountains…The gentlemen named have recently returned from a moose hunt in Canada” (Art & Enterprise, p. 230).  In addition to capturing the mountainous terrain, Bierstadt also made a number of sketches of the animals indigenous to the Colorado Rockies.  Upon his return, Bierstadt completed the commission, The Rocky Mountains, Long Peak (1877, Collection of the Denver Public Library) while one of his sketches, The Mountain Sheep (Ovis Montana) (fig. 1) was published in 1879 as a wood engraving to illustrate Arthur Pendarves Vivian’s Wanderings in the Western Lands.

Rocky Mountain Sheep, painted circa 1882-83, was presumably based upon Bierstadt’s sketch from this 1876 expedition.  In contrast to the engraving that followed in which a big-horned ram toes lightly on a hilltop with majestic mountains in the distance, in the present work Bierstadt dramatically presents his subject as king of the surrounding landscape.  The animal strikes a regal pose atop an icy, rocky outcropping with a halo of light surrounding his rough-hewn curved horns.  His elevated stature and stately countenance are further underscored by the low vantage point, which allows the animal to peer out over the viewer.

In 1884, Rocky Mountain Sheep was chosen to be reproduced by artotype in The Art Union, the official journal of the American Art Union, to critical acclaim.  The journal reported:  “Mr. Bierstadt’s painting, reproduced for the present issue by the artotype process, gives a graphic idea of the peculiar species of wild or mountain sheep found throughout the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevadas.  The Ovis Montana, as zoologists call the mountain sheep, is much larger than the ordinary domestic sheep, and the horns of the male are so immense as to fully justify the popular name of 'bighorn,' bestowed upon the animal.  The wonderful stories that are told of mountain sheep leaping down sheer precipices and alighting on their horns savor more of fiction than of fact, but it is safe to say that no animal of America is such a born mountain climber.  No peak is too high, no pinnacle of rock is too steep to be surmounted by these sure-footed beasts; in the lofty solitudes of our western wilds the scent of man or wolf sends them flying to inaccessible retreats, and so alert and agile are they, that their extinction need not soon be feared.  With his well-known love of the sublime in nature, Mr. Bierstadt has done well to go up among the clouds and eternal snows of the American Alps to depict for us these hardy climbers in their chosen haunts.”