View in the Yosemite Valley 1850 - 1890

Albert Bierstadt's painting captures Yosemite's monumental landscape, a popular subject in 19th-century American art. The towering cliffs, rendered with dramatic light and shadow, invoke a sense of awe. Here, we observe a symbolic echo of the sublime—a visual vocabulary that has traversed epochs. Think of the mountain motifs of Romanticism, or even further back, the sacred mountains of ancient mythologies. The sublime is a psychological experience, isn’t it? It’s an encounter with something beyond our comprehension or control, eliciting feelings of awe, fear, and reverence. In earlier times the same feelings were invoked by depictions of the wrathful or benevolent God. These crags, rising to the sky, prompt us to consider our place in the cosmos. The persistent human quest for meaning, expressed across cultures and epochs, from the spiritual to the aesthetic, speaks to the enduring power of these symbols.