Canadian Rockies (Lake Louise)

Albert Bierstadt

Oil on paper mounted to board

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Canadian Rockies (Lake Louise) is an oil sketch on paper mounted to board by Albert Bierstadt, created around 1889 and now held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work depicts the serene glacial waters of Lake Louise set against the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the Canadian Rockies, rendered with the atmospheric luminosity and romantic grandeur characteristic of the Hudson River School. Bierstadt made such oil sketches during his travels through the American and Canadian West, using them back in his New York studio as reference material for the monumental, panoramic canvases that brought him widespread acclaim during the 1860s and 1870s. Born in Solingen, Prussia, in 1830 and raised in the United States, Bierstadt was one of the foremost landscape painters of nineteenth-century America, celebrated for his sweeping depictions of wilderness that shaped the public imagination of the North American frontier.