Passing Storm over the Sierra Nevadas

The drama of nature plays out in this monumental scene of a rainstorm moving across a mountain lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. In the late nineteenth century, Albert Bierstadt thrilled East coast and European viewers with scenes like this of the Western United States. Although the painter knew the area well from travels, particularly as an artist attached to an 1859 expedition to the Rocky Mountains, he often exaggerated the scale of mountains and ramped up the volume on dramatic contrasts between light and shadow—all in order to captivate his avid public, many of whom only knew the West through exhibition paintings such as this one.