Nineteenth-century painters climbed for these views or worked them up from sketches made on long expeditions: Albert Bierstadt in the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada and the Alps, Frederic Edwin Church in the Andes of Ecuador, Thomas Moran in Colorado, Ivan Aivazovsky in the Caucasus, and the Hudson River School in the Catskills, the Adirondacks and the White Mountains.
There are snow peaks (the Matterhorn, Lander's Peak in Wyoming, Cotopaxi) and gentler ranges in autumn colour (Mount Washington, the Shawangunks, Mount Mansfield).
A mountain painting is usually wide with a long horizon, so it suits a sofa wall or the space over a bed or a fireplace.
27 works in this collection, dated 1838 to 1890. Most represented: Albert Bierstadt (8), Frederic Edwin Church (4), and Sanford Robinson Gifford (3). Sources include The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Denver Art Museum.
