SAM Art: Sydney Laurence and the end of Beauty and Bounty

Our painters revealed to us the matchless splendor of a scenery which shall arouse increasing astonishment and reverential awe and rapture in the hearts of generations yet to be.

—Art critic S.G.W. Benjamin, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1879

 

Sydney Laurence’s career was tied to the popular interest in the Alaska Territory that followed the Gold Rush. From the time he began prospecting in the area around 1904, Laurence painted there. His paintings helped to inspire tourism, and tourism in turn led to Laurence’s commercial success.

This is an early and impressively scaled view of Laurence’s favorite and most famous subject, Mt. McKinley.  It stands as one of his greatest statements on this, America’s highest mountain peak.  He painted this impressive canvas, possibly an exhibition piece, as the U. S. government’s Interior Department was working to establish a national park with McKinley at its center, projecting: “…the creation of this national park would, no doubt, result in… additional visitors to Alaska, and would give an impetus to the settling of the country.”

Beauty and Bounty is on view through Sunday, 11 September.

“Mount McKinley,” 1914, Sydney Laurence, American, 1865-1940, oil on canvas, 38 1/4 x 28 1/4in., Promised gift of Hugh S. Ferguson, T2006.57, Photo: Paul Macapia. On view until Sunday, 11 September, in “Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration,” Simonyi Special Exhibition Galleries, fourth floor, SAM downtown.

Beauty Shot Fridays: Summertime Sun and Fun

In hopes of procuring more sun from the sky this week, we asked people to send us photos of their summertime fun in the sun. Photos did not have to be of Seattle or from this summer but could be of anything sun- and summer-related. I’ve selected a few of our brightest submissions from last week and written some of my thoughts on them… Read More

SAM Art: Beauty Bounty & Bierstadt

A Portrait of a Place

Although Albert Bierstadt had not traveled inland into the Washington Territory in 1863, he had amassed the materials he needed to paint a portrait of a place that he could identify as Puget Sound. He had made oil studies of the land forms and Natives he saw along the Columbia River. He had acquired Northwest Coast Native objects, including the examples exhibited here, all of which can be found in Bierstadt’s painting. He also had an extensive library on the early history of America to use for reference—in this case, he appears to have drawn from an illustration in James Gilchrist Swan’s early authoritative study of the region’s topography and people, The Northwest Coast, published in 1857.

 The fine points of the little-known Puget Sound landscape itself were less important to Americans in 1870 than was the fantasized idea of Puget Sound—a storied inland sea that was a gateway to exotic-seeming points of the globe and lands of unknown peoples. In the still primeval wilderness that Bierstadt depicted, the mysterious realm of an ancient class of seafarers and fishermen, Americans might imagine the modern seaport that would soon arise there—and taking pride in their vision and ingenuity, accord Bierstadt a place in history as the artist who made a valuable and pioneering record of the noble past that was a new maritime civilization’s prologue.

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, 1870, Albert Bierstadt, born Solingen, Prussia, 1830; died New York City, 1902, oil on canvas, 52 1/2 x 82 in., Gift of the Friends of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum, with additional funds from the General Acquisition Fund, 2000.70. Photo: Howard Giske. On view starting today (June 30) in Beauty and Bounty: American Art in an Age of Exploration, Special Exhibition galleries, fourth floor, SAM downtown.

Beauty Shot Fridays!

From the PR Office at SAM comes a new and fun project called “Beauty Shot Fridays.” In order to promote Beauty & Bounty and Reclaimed, we are asking our Facebook Fans to send us photos in response to a weekly question that is based on themes in the exhibitions.

We will update our question on the SAM Facebook page every Monday by 3pm and submissions will be uploaded to the page every Friday by 4pm. If you’d like to send a photo submission (captions are welcome too!), please email beautyshots@seattleartmuseum.org

Our question this is week is: where do you find beauty and bounty in your day?

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