The Merced River in Yosemite

Albert Bierstadt was one of the first landscape painters to portray the Yosemite Valley of central California. He spent seven weeks in Yosemite during the summer of 1863, and he described it as “the most magnificent place I was ever in.” In this work, Bierstadt portrays an imagined journey through the valley. In the lower left, three men relax around a campfire while their companion attempts to catch dinner. Brilliant evening light shines from the hill above, giving the scene an almost otherworldly glow. Bierstadt’s painting is peaceful and inviting, yet it portrays a region that was undergoing immense turmoil. During the 1850s, state and federal forces violently displaced many of Yosemite’s longstanding inhabitants, the Ahwahnechee people. Over the next several decades, the Ahwahnechee lobbied for the right to remain in their ancestral homelands, but Bierstadt chose not to include them in his paintings of Yosemite.