A blaze of cloud over the snow peaks, and deer at the lake

Light breaks through a bank of cloud at the centre and pours down over the snow peaks behind. Waterfalls thread the rock on both sides — a sheer grey wall on the left, a wooded slope on the right — and drop to a lake so still it holds the whole scene again. A small group of deer stands at the water's edge on the near shore, and birds are settled on the surface a little beyond them.

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was the grandest landscape painter of the American West. Born in Solingen and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he trained at the Düsseldorf academy before joining Frederick W. Lander's overland survey to the Rocky Mountains in 1859 — the first of the western journeys that gave him his subject. From the sketches he brought back he built enormous exhibition canvases such as The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) and Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868), in which shafts of light break over peaks and mirrored lakes on a scale that drew paying crowds. His paintings are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.