In 1863, Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt embarked on an expedition to California and the Pacific Northwest. Influenced by the photographs of Carleton Watkins and accompanied by the journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who chronicled the voyage for the New York Evening Post and the Atlantic Monthly, Bierstadt and his companion spent more than a month in the Yosemite Valley before traveling by steamboat, horseback, wagon, and rail into the new state of Oregon and through the Washington Territory. Seven years later, in his Manhattan studio, the artist produced a dramatic, large-scale painting of the western coastal scenery; it received critical praise as an accurate “portrait” (43) of Puget Sound. But Bierstadt had, in fact, never been there; while Puget Sound had been an intended destination of the 1863 trip, he and Ludlow had turned around before reaching it. What he did paint, and how he skillfully shaped and manipulated the very terms of fact and fiction, landscape and history, are the subjects of Patricia Junker’s slim but lavishly illustrated volume focused on Bierstadt’s canvas.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Pacific Northwest was a foreign region to most Americans. To the average citizen, travel was a challenge, logistically and financially. When Bierstadt left for his visit, a new portage railroad had just been constructed along sections of the Columbia River, and the Oregon Steam Navigation Company welcomed the artist on its ships as a guest. Nevertheless, wider access to the Pacific Northwest was limited and often difficult. Visual representations of this new part of the nation thus served as advertisements to potential settlers, investors, and travelers, in addition to fulfilling the general public’s desire to see the country’s frontiers. Bierstadt’s paintings were designed to have an emotional appeal and to offer a sense of the history—both natural and human—of these American places. Building on Junker’s argument, the pictures can therefore be seen to invite two kinds of possession: perceptual and economic. They provided the viewer with an opportunity to lay visual claim to these new landscapes while simultaneously creating an appetite for a more concrete form of ownership—investment in these lands in order to capitalize on their potential.

Bierstadt also often included scenes of Native American life in his paintings, portraying the indigenous Chinook people returning from a fishing trip with canoes and baskets of salmon—a main source of their livelihood—in Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast (1870). Ludlow described Native Americans in art-historical terms for an article in the Atlantic Monthly, noting the “attitudes of grace and power” reminiscent of “the Apollo Belvedere or the Gladiator” (37). One wonders if Ludlow had in mind Benjamin West’s famous (purported) exclamation upon seeing the Apollo Belvedere in Rome in 1760 that the sculpture resembled a young Mohawk warrior. Such aestheticizing rhetoric allows for a potentially even more problematic mode of possession, in which Native Americans are stripped of meaningful tribal distinctions and specific cultural traditions and transformed into unthreatening historical relics, comparable to ancient monuments that must be preserved by the white author or artist. Although the Chinook people lived in relative peace with settlers, the expectation in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century was that the colonial process inevitably involved the extinction of the Native population. Indian nations could be preserved through representation, if not reality.

Bierstadt’s canvases satisfied his audience’s taste for the unfamiliar while also engaging contemporary political concerns. The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863), completed in the midst of the Civil War, served as a memorial to a fallen Union officer, the young Frederick Lander. Views of Yosemite—filled with golden light, long and lush foregrounds, and immense peaks—spoke to the desire of a country torn apart by conflict to find a virginal place of possibility and reconciliation. Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast was not painted until years after the artist’s western voyage, but Junker argues that it, too, emerged from and responded to contemporary events. The delay between the 1863 trip and the 1870 painting can therefore be understood as a deliberate tactic—waiting for the right moment when interest in the Northwest had increased but not yet peaked. In 1867, Watkins—whose photographs had guided Bierstadt through Yosemite—followed the painter’s route along the Columbia, producing the first photographs of the majestic river’s gorge. Two years later, in 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed and investors looked to new frontiers to expand the nation’s transportation network. A survey of the route for the Northern Pacific Railway—from the upper Mississippi to Puget Sound—was completed in 1870, and stories began to appear in national publications about the area’s extraordinary beauty, temperate climate, and abundant natural resources. As a crucial gateway to the Far East, the Pacific Northwest also held both commercial and strategic importance, facts certainly not lost on the painting’s eventual owner, Abiel Abbot Low, a New York-based businessman who established lucrative trading relationships with China and Japan.

Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast actually pictures parts of the Columbia River, although it remains unclear whether Bierstadt purposely omitted that information in his title or if he simply allowed others to call the canvas by an inaccurate name. Yet the title was not wholly disingenuous; “Puget Sound” functioned as a generic term for the Pacific Northwest at the time. In the early twentieth century, after Bierstadt’s death, the canvas would be retitled The Storm, a reflection of that period’s interest in a more perceptual and less referential mode of landscape painting. Gerald Carr rediscovered the original title, publishing it in his entry on Bierstadt’s painting, The Shore of the Turquoise Sea, in American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), but the odd disconnect between the painting and Puget Sound’s topography has remained unexplained until Junker’s study. Although described by a nineteenth-century critic as a “portrait of the place” (43), Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast is more an evocation of a region, not geographically specific but a synthesis of observations and speculations.

Such a combination could characterize much of nineteenth-century American landscape painting, but it was Bierstadt who was celebrated and criticized—more than any other artist of this period—for blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. On the one hand, the artist was an explorer, able to justify the veracity of his painted subjects by virtue of having been to (or near) the places he depicted and having suffered the unpleasant consequences of such frontier travel (as reported to the public by Ludlow). Junker has carefully researched and documented Bierstadt’s journey, revealing an itinerary that is much more extensive than previously known. In seeking the “fact” in Puget Sound, she considers what the artist actually saw as well as the books he consulted and the artifacts he collected. The painter’s penchant for the fictional is better known—his too-tall, too-steep mountains; his composite technique; his interest in theater; his “great picture” exhibitions with their stagecraft, mass-appeal, and impressive profits.

But is it ultimately useful to consider Bierstadt’s works as expressing a binary between fact and fiction, one that requires “sorting out what is the literal truth” (22)? Although Junker states that “separating fact from fiction is a small point” (22), she nevertheless spends much of the publication doing just that, considering, among other things, the places Bierstadt was actually referencing, the Native American objects he owned and incorporated, and the texts and images he used to create his dramatic maritime scene. Yet one wonders if the very (large) point of Bierstadt’s work—and the reason for the success of his enterprise—is that he refused to recognize such a binary at all. In paintings such as Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, indigenous life, vertiginous cliffs, and rough seas are smoothly transformed into an unproblematic vision, an interpretation of a people and a place that nevertheless denies the viewer any interpretive agency. Bierstadt’s canvases seem resolutely unconcerned with the questions of facticity that preoccupied his own critics and continue to direct scholarship.

Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber’s important catalogue for the last retrospective of Bierstadt’s work (Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, New York: Brooklyn Museum, in association with Hudson Hills Press, 1990) approached his oeuvre from a somewhat different angle, focusing on the artist’s entrepreneurial tactics and arguing that these strategies must be given equal consideration alongside the paintings themselves. The artist certainly seemed equally invested in both the work on the canvas and the work of the canvas in the world. A reviewer from the time wrote that Bierstadt had “copyrighted nearly all the principal mountains” in the West (quoted in J. Gray Sweeney, “An ‘Indomitable Explorative Enterprise’: Inventing National Parks,” in Pamela J. Belanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at Mount Desert, Rockland, ME: Farnsworth Art Museum and University Press of New England, 1999, 136); despite the jovial tone, the comment has provocative connotations. Through paint and canvas, Bierstadt “copyrighted” whole mountain ranges. Through his deft marketing and display, he circulated this aesthetic claim, cannily turning visual representation into intellectual ownership, even a form of physical possession. Although his geography may have lacked precision, of far greater concern was that these landscapes be recognized as his. They could then be “sold” to the spectator, initiating a kind of secondary degree of possession based on a transaction between artist and audience.

Junker’s book engagingly and skillfully uses a single painting to tell a compelling story about an artist’s travels, his sources and techniques, his critics, and his shrewd appeal to popular taste. Rather than functioning as just a landscape, the painting, Junker convincingly argues, should be seen as a work of history, one invested both in contemporary events and in the depiction of Native American life. The larger questions that remain, and that seem worthy of a longer study, are why critics at the time were so tenaciously invested in naming what was “objective,” “factual,” “truthful,” or “authentic” in landscape paintings and how, simultaneously, Bierstadt’s pictures make such distinctions seem curiously insignificant, as if their real concern was much more subjective: could a landscape be possessed and, if so, how could a canvas make such a claim?