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©
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Albert Bierstadt

Evening on the Prairie

ca. 1870
Oil on canvas.
81.3 x 123 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
468
(
1981.56
)
ROOM 31
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Born into a German family who emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, Albert Bierstadt was one of the most prominent members of the Hudson River School and one of the first painters of the newly discovered landscape of the Far West, to which he travelled on numerous occasions. In 1859 the young artist joined the state expedition entrusted with the mission of opening a new railroad route to the Pacific on the orders of Colonel Frederick W. Lander. This initial contact with the legendary American mountains and the native peoples in their unspoilt habitats1 would be followed by another journey four years later, in 1863, with the writer and art critic of the New York Evening Post Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who left a detailed written testimony of the adventure in The Heart of the Continent.

Although everything appears to indicate that Evening on the Prairie was painted by Bierstadt on returning from what would be the last of his trips to the West in 1870, accompanied by his wife in the newly operational railway, the scene is directly related to one of the picturesque spots described in the letter he published in the art newspaper The Crayon after his first trip. In the aforementioned letter the artist not only recounted his adventure but gave enthralling descriptions of the Rocky Mountains, which he likened to the Alps.

Through paintings like this one, Bierstadt provides us with an idealised, bucolic view of the West and links up with the pastoral tradition of nineteenth-century German landscape painting. According to Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, compositional elements such as the low horizon and the figure of the solitary rider silhouetted against the light of a brilliant sunset display traces of the influence of the German painter Andreas Achenbach, whose oeuvre Bierstadt studied in Düsseldorf. The gleaming clouds and radiating bands of light, so characteristic of the painter, also bear a certain relationship to the exuberant sunsets imbued with theatrical effects of his contemporary Frederic Church, particularly Twilight in the Wilderness.

Paloma Alarcó
19th Century19th Century. North American Painting. Hudson River SchoolPaintingOilcanvas
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Evening on the Prairie. Atardecer en la pradera, c. 1870
Evening on the Prairie
Albert Bierstadt

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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Evening on the Prairie. Atardecer en la pradera, c. 1870
Evening on the Prairie
Albert Bierstadt

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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