High Sierra Topix

The Inaugural lunch was held under an 1865 painting of Yosemite Valley by Thomas Hill. I'd say that is a good start!

That was the very first thing that caught my eye with the opening shot of the lunch room -- though, from a distance, I thought it was Bierstadt. A really great painting, as are all his Western scenes. Also, Feinstein gave it a few words in her introduction and welcome to everyone.

I also noticed on the HBO coverage of the Sunday concert, the National Park idea was given a couple of minutes (forgot who read the brief history -- featured Teddy Roosevelt).

So, yes, a hopeful beginning for that and so much else.

g.

Yeah, I saw that, too. Cool! When I get longing for the west I go up to Washington and check out the Thomas Moran paintings. The most famous one (The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, painted from what is now called "Artist's Point" I think) is a good 8 feet on a side -- next best thing to being there, and (for me) it's a much cheaper trip! You can almost smell the sulfur... This one is cropped on the right side, but you get the idea...

On my occasional forays to either DC or New York, I always look for any Western Art section -- Hill, Bierstadt, Ayers etc. All those guys understood space & horizons. Must have been a huge shock to the Eastern aesthete. Even today, you still get eastern reviewers talking about "a remoteness and implacability so bleak, hard, and cold that they would provoke terror were they not so admirably encompassed by a rectangular frame." (from a Vanity Fair review of Ansel Adams in 2002).

I wonder, though, if Bierstadt was purposely playing to that "terror" the easterners seemed to crave and expect (kind of like, pardon me, the photographer Galen Rowell).

Thomas Hill's View of the Yosemite Valley -- fairly realistic:




By contrast, here's an especially wild Bierstadt:



Not to overdo it on Easterner bashing, but it was the big publishers there who would reject many of our greatest writers because "these books have trees in them." -- A classic rejection of A River Runs Through It. MacLean got the last laugh by 1) having a best seller when he did find a publisher and 2) writing the greatest put down when that same publisher asked to do his next book: "If you were the last publisher and I the last writer, literature would die."