Trout Fishing in America

Media - 1977.107.1 - SAAM-1977.107.1_2 - 116659
Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Helen Huntington Hull, granddaughter of William Brown Dinsmore, who acquired the painting in 1873 for "The Locusts," the family estate in Dutchess County, New York, 1977.107.1
Kriston
July 5, 2006

Peer closely at Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California—you need to be standing up close and personal, because you won't find it even in a large image—and you will see, in the lower left-hand corner of the painting, hovering in a stream under the shadow of a rock outcrop, a trout. Only one trout, but he took the time to paint it. Many early American paintings feature livestock (symbols of hearth and abundance): Bierstadt's little fish completes a scene of feeding ducks and elk.

Directions to Bierstadt's landscape: second floor, east wing.

 

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