Cliffs and still water under a sky of burning orange cloud

A narrow lake lies between high cliffs. A thin waterfall drops down the left-hand wall, dark pines crowd the slope opposite, and the sky beyond burns orange behind long bars of cloud until the whole surface of the water takes the colour. A heron stands among the rocks in the near shallows with a gull skimming low over the water beside it. This is a chromolithograph published by L. Prang & Co. after Bierstadt, and the publisher's line is still visible in the lower right of the image.

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.