The Trappers' Camp

On view in the American Art before 1900 galleries

In the Romantic mindset of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, mountain men came to embody the land of promise and abundance associated with the American West. Under a moonlit sky, Albert Bierstadt’s trappers are at home in the dark, mysterious wilderness. Based on sketches he made during his first trip west in 1859 accompanying Frederick William Lander’s surveying expedition to Montana, Bierstadt later created landscapes such as this one in his New York studio. Painted on the eve of the Civil War, his frontier scenes offered a rustic, idyllic vision of the West to Easterners who were anxiously anticipating the outbreak of violence.