Lake Tahoe, California

When Bierstadt dated this canvas 1867, the lake in it had no settled name. California's maps called it Lake Bigler, after John Bigler, governor of the state in the 1850s, whose sympathy for the South during the Civil War had made the name unpopular. Many preferred Tahoe, taken from the word the Washoe people, who lived along its shores, used for the lake.

Bierstadt had stopped there in 1863, on his first trip to California, and his travelling companion, the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, called it Lake Tahoe in his account of the journey. The law went the other way. In 1870 the California legislature made Lake Bigler the official name, and only in 1945 did a new act declare that the lake known as Bigler would from then on be Lake Tahoe.

The canvas, under 80 centimetres wide, dates from the year Bierstadt sailed with his new wife for two years in Europe. In the lower left corner he put his monogram and the short date, 67.