Earth Day Landscape

For Earth Day, I thought I'd share with you my favorite landscape currently hanging with its fellow American Landscapes in the Lehman Wing: Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863. This is particularly arresting for me because it is a snapshot of a point in time, a landscape since extinct by the settlement of the west and the proliferation of the American Indian. When I look at this landscape, I think about the Rockies of 1863 and the frontier that exists only in history books and on Bierstdt's canvas.