Great art is timeless, and speaks across time, culture, and space. Yet great works come from real people living real lives—whether their work was made 5 minutes or 500 years ago. Popular Smithsonian Associates speaker Paul Glenshaw returns to the Art + History series to look at great works of art in their historical context. He delves into the time of the artist, explores the present they inhabited, and what shaped their vision and creations.

Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California, painted in 1868, is many things all at once. It is Bierstadt’s personal expression of his joyful first sight of the Sierra Nevada and a scene he thoroughly invented. It’s a majestic depiction of the natural beauty of the American West and part of a brazen marketing scheme deployed by the showman/artist for his spreading wealth and fame. The painting, along with Bierstadt’s many similar works, was a powerful lure for immigrants and settlers drawn by the promise of the American West, yet it also reveals the complicated legacy of Manifest Destiny.

Glenshaw traces Bierstadt’s path from his immigrant childhood in Massachusetts through training in Düsseldorf and painting in Rome, culminating in extravagant exhibitions—before his rapidly declining popularity. It is a thoroughly American story.

Glenshaw is an artist, educator, author, and filmmaker with more than 30 years’ experience working across disciplines in the arts, history, and sciences. He teaches drawing for Smithsonian Associates and studied painting at Washington University in St. Louis.

Additional Art + History Programming

• February 17: Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze
• March 24: Augustus Saint-Gaudens' The Shaw Memorial

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