Veduta della Yosemite Valley, California

Bierstadt finished this in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, when a battered country was hungry for something to feel proud of, and he offered it the West. He had sketched Yosemite two years earlier and now built the whole valley into a wall of golden evening light, El Capitan rising on the right, Sentinel Rock on the left, the Merced River drawing the eye toward the glowing distance. It is nature staged like scripture. Later that year a Chicago distiller paid $20,000 for it, the most anyone had yet spent on a work by a living American painter. The light is the real subject, poured so evenly down the valley that the cliffs seem to hold their breath. The canvas changed hands for over a century and came to the Birmingham museum in 1991, a gift from the city's public library.