Valley of the Yosemite

In April 1864 New York held a vast charity fair for the Sanitary Commission, the private relief body that cared for sick and wounded Union soldiers, and this small painting on paperboard was sold at its auction for 1,600 dollars, the highest price paid there for any picture. Albert Bierstadt had seen Yosemite only the summer before, travelling west with his friend the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and this is probably the first painting he made of the valley, worked up in his New York studio. Ludlow's own account came out in the Atlantic Monthly that June, claiming the valley beat the Alps for waterfalls and the Himalayas for cliffs. The little picture has the freshness of a study done on the spot, but it is a finished sketch, and Bierstadt seems to have used it for the far larger view of the valley he painted the next year, now in Birmingham, Alabama. The buyer at the fair was James Lenox, a wealthy New York collector of books and pictures, whose library later became part of the New York Public Library, and there the painting stayed until 1943. That year it was bought by Maxim Karolik, a Russian-born singer who, with his wife Martha, was collecting American paintings made between 1815 and 1865, at a time when few people wanted them. Martha Karolik gave it to Boston in 1947.