A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Bierstadt finished this enormous canvas in 1866, the year after the Civil War ended, when Americans were looking west again and the government wanted them to go and settle there. It is over three and a half metres wide, and he painted it to be shown as a spectacle, a single Great Picture hung in a darkened room under dramatic light with an admission ticket at the door. The scene comes from sketches he made in the Colorado Rockies in 1863, half the peaks in sunshine and half swallowed by a coming storm, with Native hunters after deer below. He named the mountain Rosalie after the woman he would later marry, at the time the wife of a friend travelling with him. The real peak was given a different name before the century was out.