I'm Mark Mitchell. I'm the Holcombe T. Green Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery.

You're looking at a view of the Yosemite Valley from about midway up the valley. You're looking west at the setting sun over the Merced River. This is called "Yosemite Valley, Glacier Point Trail." It was painted around 1873 by the artist Albert Bierstadt, who was making his second trip to the valley.

It was rather a different place than when he made his first trip in the 1860s, because in the interim, it had been made into a sort of reserved parkland given to the state of California by Abraham Lincoln in 1864. It suddenly became a place where people could go to get back to nature and to escape the city life that was really absorbing many Americans at this time. As industry accelerated in the midst of the Civil War, of course, there was incredible strife and violence, and this was a place where people could go to find peace and also to experience the majesty of the American landscape.

Bierstadt was an artist who really made a career of looking at grand vistas like this and painting really big paintings like this one. This was a sort of phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century, when artists would paint these large compositions and then tour them around from city to city. They would take out advertisements in the local paper, and people would come and pay a quarter to visit the pictures. They would be staged in these dedicated galleries. It was very hard to get across the country in the 1860s and early 1870s. The introduction of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 suddenly made California more available for people to get to from the East Coast, where artists like Bierstadt predominantly lived and worked and where their markets were.

So this is a view of the West for an Eastern audience. They would not know this place from personal experience. They would've read about it in the newspaper and in the guidebook, but they wouldn't have had an opportunity to see it in person. So Bierstadt brings that to them. There are a lot of things in this painting. It is a great picture for balancing what I would call poetic evocation and very specific detail when you stand back, at the back of the gallery. This is why it is on a long vista in this gallery. You can look at it from a distance and get the sense of light and air, a sense of openness, reach, and expansiveness. And then as you get closer, you start to pick up on the details. You start to see how much work he's put into El Capitan, there on the right, that huge soar and granite cliff face that is such an icon of the Yosemite Valley.

You see the beautiful ribbon of the Merced reflecting the light of the sun. You start to see how many different tree species he's included in the lower-left corner along the cliff face, as this sort of precipitous drop of the trail presents itself. And you start to pick out the people: the tourists there, perhaps with a guide. You see a man wearing a hat and a scarf of some sort, pointing out at the distance, and a young woman riding sidesaddle on the horse behind him, experiencing this landscape as a visitor. Everything about the West really presented the sense of opportunity for Eastern audiences. It was a new landscape, a new place, an environment that was not heavily populated, that was not deforested, that was not overly exploited in terms of its resources. And in this landscape, Eastern audiences found a sense of renewal. Especially in the wake of the Civil War, which ended in 1865, American audiences really sought a sense of unity, a sense of a future together, of one collective identity, one nation. Vistas like this one offered a way out of this sectional conflict between North and South: a new landscape, one that they could experience themselves but also envision as part of a different future for the country.