The Grizzly Giant Sequoia, Mariposa Grove, California - Albert Bierstadt (ca. 1872–1873)

Albert Bierstadt

Oil on paper mounted on board

Smithsonian American Art Museum

This luminous oil study depicts the Grizzly Giant, one of the most celebrated sequoias in Mariposa Grove, California, its massive trunk — 28 feet wide and 209 feet tall — positioned left of center against a quiet forest backdrop. Painted during Bierstadt's residence in San Francisco between 1871 and 1873, the work is executed in oil on paper mounted on board, reflecting the artist's practice of creating large studio sketches as preparatory studies for monumental exhibition canvases. Bierstadt, a German-American master of the Hudson River School and Rocky Mountain School traditions, trained in Düsseldorf and became the preeminent painter of the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century. The painting is notable for borrowing the vantage point of Carleton Watkins's early photograph of the same tree, and is believed to have served as a study for Bierstadt's larger and more finished California Redwoods (ca. 1875).