En Sierra Nevada, California

This blazing view of the American West was not painted in America. Bierstadt worked it up in his studio in Rome over the winter of 1867 and 1868, years after he had actually crossed the Sierra Nevada, composing the scene from memory and field sketches. It is not a real place. The mirror-still lake, the deer, the shafts of light breaking through cloud are assembled into an ideal, the kind of untouched paradise Europeans and easterners imagined the West to be. He was painting just after the Civil War, when a reunited country was pushing hard toward the Pacific. Bierstadt showed the canvas in Berlin, where it won a gold medal, and in London, before he ever brought it home to sell.