Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall

Albert Bierstadt, 1830 - 1902

Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, 1864
Oil on canvas, 34 1/4 x 27 1/8 in.

Bierstadt earned his initial popularity with a series of landscape paintings of the Rocky Mountains. The works were based on sketches he made on a United States Government expedition engaged in mapping an overland route to the Pacific. In 1863, he set out with a group of artists on his second western trip to visit the valley of Yosemite.

This painting, done in his New York studio after his return, conveys the spectacular scale and natural majesty of Yosemite Falls, then thought to be the highest in the country. At the close of a day of sketching, the artists gather at their camp near a grove of oaks and cypresses. Light illuminates the falls and the meadow bordering the Merced River. In the right corner of the painting are a sketching umbrella, a color-box, and other objects that Bierstadt took on the expedition.

Provenance:

American Insurance Company, Boston
Gift to John Ingersoll Bowditch, 1864
To his son, Charles Pinkney Bowditch, 1889
To his son, Harold Bowditch, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1919
Acquired by the Putnam Foundation, 1966 [1]

Provenance Notes:

[1] Having been separated from its original title, the painting was known by at least two other titles by the time it was acquired by the Putnam Foundation: Richard Schaefer Trump, “Life and Works of Albert Bierstadt” (Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 1963) p. 218, as Yosemite Scene of Bridal Veil Falls; Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt: Painter of the American West (New York, 1973), pp. 132, 155, 326, no. 17, fig.1 (frontispiece), as Camping in the Yosemite.