Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863). Oil on canvas. 187 x 307. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is an 1863 landscape oil painting by the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt. It is based on sketches made during Bierstadt's travels with Frederick W. Lander's Honey Road Survey Party in 1859. The painting shows Lander's Peak in the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains, with an encampment of Native Americans in the foreground. It has been compared to, and exhibited with, The Heart of the Andes by Frederic Edwin Church. Lander's Peak immediately became a critical and popular success and sold in 1865 for $25,000. Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany, and, though his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two, he spent many of his formative years in Europe. He made his debut in an 1858 exhibition, but his breakthrough came in the aftermath of a journey he made the following year. In the spring of 1859, Bierstadt joined the Honey Road Survey Party led by then-colonel Frederick W. Lander. He traveled as far as the Wind River Range in the Rocky Mountains, and made studies for numerous paintings along the way. Bierstadt was greatly impressed by the landscape he encountered, and described the Rocky Mountains as the best material for the artist in the world. He had a habit of doing extensive preparation for his work, on occasion making as many as fifty sketches for a single painting. In 1860, he exhibited Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak at the National Academy of Design. His greatest success, however, came with The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, which he exhibited in 1863 at the Tenth Street Studio Building, where he also had a studio. The painting shows Lander's Peak, a mountain with a summit of 10,456 feet in the Wind River Range in modern-day Wyoming. The peak was named after Frederick W. Lander on Bierstadt's initiative, after Lander's death in the Civil War. In one description of the painting, Sharply pointed granite peaks and fantastically illuminated clouds float above a tranquil, wooded genre scene. The foreground is dominated by the campsite of a tribe of Native Americans. The landscape in the painting is not the actual landscape as it appears at Lander's Peak, but rather an ideal landscape based on nature, altered by Bierstadt for dramatic effect. Bierstadt's painting hit a nerve with contemporary Americans, by portraying the grandeur and pristine beauty of the nation's western wilderness. It was a reference to the idea of Manifest Destiny, where the Rocky Mountains represented both natural beauty, and an obstacle to westward expansion. In the words of historian Anne F. Hyde: Bierstadt painted the West as Americans hoped it would be, which made his paintings vastly popular and reinforced the perception of the West as either Europe or sublime Eden. At the same time, the Native Americans in the foreground gave the scene authenticity, and presented it as a timeless place, untouched by European hands. At the forefront of the painting, Bierstadt paints a band of Shoshone Native peoples. According to a review in Harper's Weekly from March 26, 1864, Lander's Peak, is purely an American scene, and from the faithful and elaborate delineation of the Indian village, a form of life now rapidly disappearing from the earth, may be called a historic landscape. Bierstadt illustrated Shoshone people along with the majestic peaks as a marker of the sublime which authors like James Fenimore Cooper, John C. Fremont, and Washington Irving wrote about. Bierstadt does not include who these people are in his painting title. Unlike Catlin, Bierstadt focused not on the individuality of members of the Shoshone people, rather, his focus was on their relationship with landscape. As Bierstadt scholar Matthew Biagell suggests, as He placed them, as he placed European peasants in earlier works, in the middle distance so that we witness their presence in a landscape setting rather than focus on their movements. In 1859, Eastern Shoshone peoples lived in the region now called Western Wyoming. Bierstadt commented on the Shoshone people he saw in a letter from July 10, 1859 which The Crayon, an art magazine, published in September 1859. The manners and customs of the Indians are still as they were hundreds of years ago, and now is the time to paint them, for they are rapidly passing away, and soon will be known only in history. I think that the artist ought to tell his portion of their history as well as the writer; a combination of both will assuredly render it more complete Bierstadt adds, We have a great many Indian subjects. We were quite fortunate in getting them, the natives not being very willing to have the brass tube pointed at them.