Wreck of the "Ancon" in Loring Bay, Alaska

Bierstadt had not planned to go to Alaska in 1889. He had travelled to western Canada to paint and to work with the owners of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but forest fires around Banff spoiled his plans, so from Victoria he took a steamer north to see Alaska for the first time. The steamer was the Ancon, a wooden sidewheeler built in San Francisco in 1867. In the small hours of 28 August, as she pulled away from the cannery wharf at Loring, about 20 miles north of present-day Ketchikan, her stern lines were not properly handled and she drifted onto a reef a couple of hundred yards from shore. Nobody died. The passengers were taken off at dawn, and a few days later another steamer, the George W. Elder, came to carry them south. As the tide went out, the weight of her cargo broke the Ancon's back. Bierstadt used the wait to paint. This study on paper shows the stranded ship listing under a grey sky, in muted colours far from his golden western panoramas. He later wrote that he had 60 studies in colour and two books full of drawings from Alaska.