Image and Imagination: Art of the American West
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Albert Bierstadt, Upper Falls of the Yellowstone, oil on canvas, 1872. Courtesy the Woodcock Foundation for the Appreciation of the Arts |
On our left, and towards the setting sun, and blue and purple in the distance, rose the shining summits ... and near its base, a blotched mass of deep green (its pines and cedars), underlined by a streak of white, the sands of its shore, at ebb tide. No imagination could paint, and few artists' pencils ever have painted, scenes so grand and so picturesque as these. George Catlin (1796-1872), Last Rambles Amongst the Indians of the Rocky Mountains and of the Andes, 1866. |
Alexander Gardner, Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific, photograph, c.1867. Collection of the Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis |