The Grizzly Giant Sequoia, Mariposa Grove, California

In May 1863 Bierstadt and the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow left New York for the artist’s second trip through the West. Their principal objective was to capture the beauty of Yosemite Valley, which the photographs of Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) had revealed to astonished New Yorkers in 1862. In a drawing room in San Francisco in August, on the eve of their departure for the final leg of their journey there, they again gazed at Watkins’s photographs. Shortly before reaching Yosemite, they and other artist-companions -- Enoch Wood Perry (1831-1915) and Virgil Williams (1830-1886) of San Francisco -- paused near Mariposa to sketch the big trees. Although the museum’s painting was not executed until about ten years later, it should not be surprising that in it Bierstadt borrowed the subject and vantage point of one of Watkins’s early photographs of the Grizzly Giant Sequoia. The size of the museum’s painting indicates that it was not one of the oil sketches Bierstadt made that day. All of his sketches from that trip were fourteen by nineteen inches or smaller. Bierstadt did not employ the twenty-two-by-thirty-inch sheet until 1872, and then only for oil sketches painted in the studio. The museum’s painting probably dates from Bierstadt’s residence in San Francisco (1871-73). It may be visible in a photograph probably taken in 1873 of the artist’s studio, where it hangs on the wall among rows of studio sketches (Hendricks, Bierstadt, CL-6). Bierstadt often painted the big California trees. He exhibited such paintings in 1874 at the National Academy of Design and the Royal Academy. The Grizzly Giant still stands in Mariposa Grove. The huge tree, to the left of center in the painting, was 28 feet wide and 209 feet high. Equally impressive was the giant’s age, estimated at twenty-five hundred years, a span of time going back to the kings of the Old Testament. Bierstadt may have used the museum’s painting as a study for his ten-foot-high California Redwoods, painted in about 1875 (private collection). In that painting he corrected the Grizzly Giant’s leaning, noticeable in the oil study. Intended as a record for the artist’s later use, these studies have a fresh realism often sacrificed to dramatic effect in the finished exhibition paintings. [source]