Piz Bernina, Switzerland

Piz Bernina, on the Swiss border with Italy in the canton of Graubünden, stands 4,049 metres high, the tallest summit of the eastern Alps. It was first climbed only in 1850, by Johann Coaz, a surveyor mapping the region for the new federal map of Switzerland.

Bierstadt went back to Switzerland again and again between 1867 and the 1890s, and the museum dates this sketch to around 1880 to 1890. He painted it in oil on paper, the snowfields lit up white, a dark slope of pines cutting across from the right, his monogram signature at the lower right.

Before the sheet was mounted on board, someone wrote on its back Rocky Mts. Colo., the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where Bierstadt had made his name a generation earlier. Today the museum identifies the peak as the Bernina. The sketch stayed with Bierstadt until his death in 1902, and Martha Karolik gave it to the museum in 1947.