Tread Light Upon the Mountains: Artistic Visions of Light in the Rockies

    Light is essential to the experience of visual artwork. Without good lighting, paintings’ colors become indistinct, details blurring into one another. Harsh light can wash out the fine hairlines on a statue, while insufficient lighting may cause the shadows that define the form of a statue to swallow it up. Theaters need spotlights to guide the audience to the lead actors or dancers. Likewise, light is essential to the wonder of nature. Without light, we’d never see the glistening of snow, the reflection of the moon upon a lake, or the fiery oranges and pinks of a sunset. The shadows of clouds refresh us on sweltering days, and sunshine warms us against chill winds, cutting through the gloom of overcast winter skies.

    The snow-capped peaks, deep crags, and expansive skies of the Rocky Mountains have proven a playground for artists to study and experiment with the application of light. Big skies, big clouds, and big rocks create oceans of light interspersed with distinct swaths of shadow. The particular artists here displayed each see and capture different elements of the Rockies and the light which pervades them. For Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, the mountains are holy ground, glowing like the interior of a cathedral. Ansel Adams and Eliot Elisofon represent the jagged peaks as something darker and maybe even more ominous. Some of these artists use light to fade the mountains into the background, while others cast them in shadow to contrast them against the sky. We invite you to join these painters and photographers as you and they explore the Rockies and experience them in seven unique lights.

The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak

Albert Bierstadt

1863

Oil on canvas

73 1/2 in. × 10 ft. 3/4 in.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (07.123)

The Rockies are a regular feature in Bierstadt’s paintings; this particular image was the product of a Western tour with a certain Colonel Lander, for whom the peak is named. Curiously, the range depicted doesn’t exist, being cobbled together from several separate peaks (a habit of Bierstadt’s his critics routinely lambaste). Note the work’s division into distinct thirds: foreground, ridgeline, and mountain range. Our eyes naturally settle upon the waterfall in the center of the painting because of the spotlight the artist grants it. Similarly, although the mountains fade into the sky, their brightness catches our attention more than the darker, more richly colored foreground.

A Successful Hunt

Henry François Farny

1906

Gouache, watercolor, gum Arabic glazes, charcoal on white wove paper mounted on board

14 5/8 in. × 9 3/16 in.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015.613)

A Successful Hunt offers perhaps the most realistic depiction of the Rockies in this exhibit. The Native Americans (a favorite subject of Farny’s) in the foreground are the obvious focus of the work; the shades of gray and brown with which they, their horses, and the slain prey drape themselves are in stark contrast with the pale gray snow. However, they exist in the shadow of the peaks surrounding them. The rocky outcroppings behind them instead enjoy the only distinct light Farny offers. This light is not warm and romantic, but harsh. The snow gleams blinding white, and as the hunters lose our attention, the unforgiving rocks behind them become the new subject: immense, unforgiving, severe.

The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park

Ansel Adams

1942 (negative), 1976-1977 (print)

Gelatin silver print

15 1/16 in. × 19 1/16 in.

Philadelphia Museum of Art (1976-213-30)

As a black-and-white photographer, Adams had only the light in his images to manipulate. His renown as an artist demonstrates his understanding and skill of how to apply light in his photographs. Having meticulously captured this image, with great concern for the utmost clarity, he altered the tones already present, brightening some patches while simultaneously plunging certain cloud-shadowed regions into pitch black. The grim darkness of the mountain range solidifies their place as the focal point of the image, standing out even among the stormy clouds around them and the shadowy plains below them. As our eyes descend from the heights, the bright reflection of the Snake River cuts through the darker shades of the shoreline and guides us to the bottom of the frame and its return to blackness.

Sunset on Lake — Rocky Mountains

Alfred Jacob Miller

1837

Oil on canvas

6 1/4 in. × 10 1/8 in.

Gilcrease Museum (01.2409)

This tiny landscape explores the unique palette of sunset hues and, in so doing, makes color its focus more so than any figure or feature present in the image. Miller here departs somewhat from his typical subject matter of trappers and native Americans, simply rendering two mounted travellers on the banks of the titular lake. This is a perfect reflection of the fiery sky above it; its golden waters disappear into the faint purple shore in the distance. From this nearly invisible strip of land rise purple and pink mountains. Like the lake, they lose themselves in the shades of the sunset, distinguished mainly by the jagged line they etch across the middle of the scene.

The Sky Pond

Paul Kauvar Smith

1933-1934

Oil on canvas

42 in. × 50 1/8 in.

Smithsonian American Art Museum (1964.1.59)

This tiny landscape explores the unique palette of sunset hues and, in so doing, makes color its focus more so than any figure or feature present in the image. Miller here departs somewhat from his typical subject matter of trappers and native Americans, simply rendering two mounted travellers on the banks of the titular lake. This is a perfect reflection of the fiery sky above it; its golden waters disappear into the faint purple shore in the distance. From this nearly invisible strip of land rise purple and pink mountains. Like the lake, they lose themselves in the shades of the sunset, distinguished mainly by the jagged line they etch across the middle of the scene.

Mountain of the Holy Cross

Thomas Moran

1890

Watercolor and gouache over graphite on paper

17 13/16 in. × 12 3/8 in.

National Gallery of Art (2012.28.1) 
 

Moran is the painter of Yellowstone, which makes him by extant a painter of the Rockies. Like fellow Hudson River School member Bierstadt, his paintings strive for the Romanticist notion of the sublime, revelling in the size and majesty of the mountains. Mountain of the Holy Cross utilizes a cool color palette of grays, pale blues, and faded browns, which evoke a brisk but sunny fall day. The foreground is lit beautifully—not enough light to wash out details, but not so little as to cast the waterfall in gloom. Dividing the composition is a narrow valley cast in shadow and rising up into the clouds. These clouds encircle the mountain, the spotlighted focus of the painting, rendering the already iconographic peak into a truly heavenly object. The light which falls upon this peak hallows it, elevating the landscape into a sacred image.

Rocky Mountain Auto Tour (Moonlight behind Jenny Lake w. Grand Tetons in bkgrd.)

Eliot Elisofon

1958

Color transparency

Dimensions not given

LIFE Photo Collection

Appropriately, the darkest image of the exhibition is the product of the one artist unlike the others present here—Eliot Elisofon, a photojournalist. He maintains the compositional mindset of a professional artist and divides the picture into distinct halves, both of which consist of a region of darkness against one of (relative) light. The brightest point in the photo lies in a gap between the mountains, serving to draw our attention not to itself, but to the shadowy blue crags fencing it in. In fact, such dusky shades of blue comprise nearly the entire color range of the picture, clearly taken near sunset or sunrise. Despite its darkness, the image comes across as sleepy more than foreboding, the only threat being the jagged tops of the peaks.