太平洋沿岸的普吉特湾

In 1870 the transcontinental railroad was barely a year old, and investors were already looking north to Washington Territory, where a new line, the Northern Pacific, was meant to run all the way to Puget Sound. That is the country Bierstadt painted here, though he had never actually stood on the Sound. A New York merchant in the China trade, Abiel Abbot Low, commissioned the scene, and Bierstadt built it from written descriptions and from his own memory of the Northwest coast, which he had glimpsed along the Columbia River back in 1863. The Native canoes and carved objects on the shore are ones he had collected himself. Over it all he threw a storm, waves breaking on the beach under a sun that pushes through the dark clouds.