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Artist or Maker: Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

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Provenance: Private collection, San Francisco, California, circa 1960s.
By descent to the present owner.

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Exhibited: San Francisco, California, California Historical Society, Californians Collect California , May 1-29, 1970, no. 5 (as Entrance to the Golden Gate ).
San Francisco, California, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Albert Bierstadt, An Observer of Air, Light, and the Feeling of Place , 1985-1986 (as Entrance to San Francisco, Golden Gate ).

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Notes: During his extensive travels in the West, Albert Bierstadt spent much of his time in California. As in many of the artist's works, in the present painting, Entrance to Golden Gate , Bierstadt chose to depict a landscape with only a hint of the presence of man. Here he has selected a distant vista across the San Francisco Bay with golden light hitting the outcropping of rocks and the cresting waves in the foreground and a dense fog bank rolling over the far hills. Bierstadt combines these elements with an eye towards creating an utterly placid, naturalistic scene of California splendor.

Due to the often struggle of transporting materials in the field, Bierstadt almost exclusively worked with oil paints on a fine paper support rather than canvas. Slightly larger in scale and more highly finished than most of his compositions of this type, Entrance to Golden Gate may well have been painted by Bierstadt on the spot, making it one of the earliest California landscapes painted directly from nature.

Bierstadt and his wife visited San Francisco frequently and on an extended stay from 1871-73 the artist constructed a studio on Clay Street. "The studio had large windows on all four sides and commanded a magnificent view of San Francisco below and the bay from Golden Gate in the west to Mount Diablo in the east. Facing to the north, the window was so large that the wall appeared to be practically all glass. Through it the viewer could take, in one glance, reported the San Francisco Bulletin , 'a view of the whole passage from the Pacific Ocean to the inner bay, with the peninsular and Marine [ sic ] county shores, including Mt. Tamalpais, a distance of six or seven miles.'" (R. Trump, Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt , dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1963, p. 166)

Far removed from the majestic landscapes of grandiose romanticism ripe for Eastern consumption that brought Bierstadt notable fame, Entrance to Golden Gate provides a more subtly thoughtful yet still luminous vision of the west as an untouched, American Eden. Whereas many of the artist's large scale works represent the overwhelming grandeur that is oftentimes at conflict with impending industrialization and the presence of man, the present work reveals a more intimate view of a coast that is in fact rapidly urbanizing yet seen here as slowly evolving landscape. Entrance to Golden Gate stands out in Bierstadt's oeuvre for its understated reverence that elevates this tranquil coastal scene to a wonderfully detailed landscape bathed in a golden California light.

In summarizing Bierstadt's achievement, his biographer, Gordon Hendricks, wrote that "his successes envelop us with the beauty of nature, its sunlight, its greenness, its mists, its subtle shades, its marvelous freshness. All of these Bierstadt felt deeply. Often he was able, with the struggle that every artist knows, to put his feelings on canvas. When he succeeded in what he was trying to do-to pass along some of his own passion for the wildness and beauty of the new West-he was as good as any landscapist in the history of American art." ( Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West , New York, 1973, p. 10)