The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak

A vast, luminous panorama of the Rocky Mountains rises in glittering snow-capped peaks above a green valley where a Native American encampment goes about its life beside a waterfall and a still lake. Albert Bierstadt, who traveled west with a survey expedition, painted the scene on a grand operatic scale, bathing it in golden, theatrical light. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, the Rocky Mountains fed the nation's awe and appetite for the West - a sublime, idealized vision of an untamed continent, spectacular in size and luminous in its romantic grandeur.