Riders halt on a ledge above a valley filled with gold

The near ground is a rocky wooded ledge at the left, where a small party has stopped among the trees, two of them still mounted. From there the ground falls away and the valley opens out, filled from end to end with golden light, the sun sitting high and hazy above it. Cliffs and pinnacles stand on both sides, and the river winds along the floor far below.

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.