Sierra Nevada, 1871-1873
Oil on canvas, 38 1/2 x 56 1/2"
Original purchase fund from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth, 1966.2.7

Albert Bierstadt captured the expansive mood of the United States by portraying the west as a seductive Eden in the years after the Civil War.  Topically popular and technically dazzling, his reputation as the painter of Manifest Destiny grew to be the stuff of legend.  As one of the most celebrated artists of his day, new canvases by Bierstadt were welcomed with streamers across Broadway in New York City and commanded record prices.  A victim of his own success, the German-born painter and explorer continued to produce meticulous grand-scale landscapes despite the rise of smaller, more brushy work in the Barbizon fashion.  Sierra Nevada, the first painting acquired by Reynolda House, set the tone for the collection as a masterful document of nineteenth-century American culture.