Gilded Age Goes West

Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opens today at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University in California.

This western landscape by Ralph Albert Blakelock is one of sixty works on view through June 17, 2001.

Blakelock, self-taught and introspective, created spiritual landscapes of sunset and moonlight. This spectral setting glows with an intense lunar light. A group of Indians are encamped near a fire, with one isolated figure contemplating the radiance in the sky.

Blakelock had visited the western territories while in his twenties. By the time this picture was painted in the late 1880s, the Indians must have represented to him a romantic evocation of a lost Eden.

Source: Richard Murray. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Ralph Albert Blakelock, 1847–1919, Moonlight, Indian Encampment, 1885–89, oil, 27 1/8 x 34 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.