Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak. 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 18
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