Object Details
Object Essay
Albert Bierstadt was not the first artist who professed to regard his smaller works lightly. When he gave Twilight, Lake Tahoe to Adeline Morse, he admonished her to say, “if a critic’s eye falls on it, that it was only a sketch.”1Bierstadt, no. 15. His attitude reflected the academic doctrine that only larger, highly finished works could command the esteem of the desired class of patron. The “sketch” was deemed better suited to the private enjoyment of the artist and his friends.
Ironically, it is the personal quality of the more intimate, less ostentatious work of Bierstadt—the sense that it springs directly from the artist’s inspiration—that is especially valued by many people today. That he took delight in the painting is obvious from its delicacy of execution and expression.
Twilight, Lake Tahoe was painted at the end of Bierstadt’s third trip West, from 1871 to 1873. Although the title is not Bierstadt’s, the scene is close to a larger work thought to be the same as that “exhibited as a Lake Tahoe scene at the N.Y. Century Association on March 6, 1874.” The composition, especially the contour of the mountains, is reversed in the later picture, suggesting that the present sketch is the source, painted at least in part on the spot.2Ibid., no. 16.
Born in Germany and raised from infancy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Bierstadt had six years of European travel and study behind him, in addition to his western trips, when he painted this small panel. By 1873, he was a mature painter who had already completed some of his best-known work; in the next decade, his critical reputation went into decline because of a pronounced shift in American taste. At this moment he was at the acme of his profession.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.