Monte Hood

1869 was the year the first railroad joined the two American coasts, and the eastern public was hungry for pictures of the West it could suddenly reach. Bierstadt gave them this. He had travelled in Oregon, but he was after grandeur more than accuracy, raising Mount Hood higher than it really stands and gathering scenery that no single viewpoint could actually take in, all bathed in a still golden light. The painting later went to the Philadelphia world's fair of 1876, then to his London studio, where Simeon and Amanda Reed, the couple who would go on to endow Reed College, bought it and shipped it home to Oregon. It reached the Portland Art Museum in 1953.