Mount Starr King, Yosemite (1866): Art, History and Details

Mount Starr King, Yosemite (1866) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albert Bierstadt (American, born Prussia [now Germany], 1830–1902).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

During the summer of 1863, Bierstadt visited Yosemite Valley in California and made numerous sketches. Back in his New York studio, he used them to produce many majestic paintings, including this view of the distant granite peak Mount Starr King. Such scenes thrilled East Coast audiences and helped encourage early movements to safeguard natural wonders. In 1864, President Lincoln signed a bill preserving Yosemite as public property; it became a national park in 1890. Bierstadt included two Native Americans with a packhorse in his composition, and their presence references the fact that Indigenous peoples had inhabited or seasonally visited the region for millennia. Over time, various government and military agencies dispossessed them of these ancestral lands. Although no longer residents in the national park, descendants of the seven Indigenous nations with ties to Yosemite persevered to live in neighboring areas.

Object facts

• Title: Mount Starr King, Yosemite
• Date: 1866
• Creator attribution: Albert Bierstadt (American, born Prussia [now Germany], 1830–1902)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas on panel-back stretcher
• Dimensions: Framed: 135.3 x 181 x 15.6 cm (53 1/4 x 71 1/4 x 6 1/8 in.); Unframed: 97 x 142.3 cm (38 3/16 x 56 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1922.684

A detail from the museum

Highly successful, Bierstadt built a mansion and named it Malkasten, a German word meaning “paintbox.”

Collection credit

Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Salome, Laurent, and Joan Carpenter Troccoli. La Mythologie de l’Ouest Dans L’art Americain, 1830-1940. Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana, 2007.
• Richardson, Edgar P. American Romantic Painting. Edited by Robert Freund. New York: E. Weyhe, 1944.
• Hendricks, Gordon. "The First Three Western Journeys of Albert Bierstadt." The Art Bulletin. 46:3 (September, 1964). pp. 333-365.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.