Albert Bierstadt came to the United States from Solingen, Germany at the age of two and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1854 Bierstadt, like many other aspiring American artists, left for Dusseldorf in order to study at the Art Academy. There he worked with German artists and other American artists such as Emmanuel Leutze. He returned to America in 1857 and began painting landscapes of the American wilderness in New York and New England and later in the West. Bierstadt was one of the large group of 19th century American landscape painters known as the Hudson River School. Hudson River School painters, including Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, whose works are represented in the museum's collection, were known for the wealth of detail in their depictions of the American landscape. Their work celebrated the natural beauty and magnificence of America. While Hudson River School paintings have often been considered literal, topographic renderings of the American countryside, more recent scholarship has discovered complex meanings in many of these landscapes, often relating to political and cultural issues of the time.

Bierstadt undertook his first expedition to the American West in 1858, as part of Colonel Frederick W. Lander's government-sanctioned expedition to the Wolf River and Shoshone Indian country; he made several more visits to the West in the 1860s and 1870s. These visits served as the inspiration for much of his work; in particular, his dramatic landscapes of the Yosemite Valley and the Rocky Mountains promoted the West as the rediscovered paradise and quickly spread the artist's fame. At the height of his career in the 1860s, his large panoramic views of the American West commanded huge sums of money and public acclaim.

The Artwork

Echo Lake was completed after one of Bierstadt's trips to the West, and for many years was thought to be a western view because of its dramatic portrayal of lake and mountains. However, recent investigation into details of Bierstadt's career has revealed that in the summer of 1860, Bierstadt and his two brothers spent the summer in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, photographing many of the natural wonders that had become tourist attractions. Albert chose the viewpoints to be photographed, while his brothers did the actual photographic work. Their work culminated in an 1862 book of stereoscopic photographs with written descriptions called Stereoscopic Views Among the Hills of New Hampshire. The photograph of Echo Lake in this book clearly identifies the subject of the museum's painting as Echo Lake.

As far as is known, the images in Bierstadt's painting are not symbols referencing specific political or cultural issues, but the painting is not a literal copy of the Echo Lake landscape as he must have seen it in 1860. Contemporary guidebooks for tourists to the area describe the scene: "...the lake walled in on all sides by Mount Cannon, Bald Mountain, and Mount Lafayette...by late afternoon, it is visited by many from nearby hotels, and by boating parties; often one sees a "flotilla" of white row boats. A trumpet was kept at the lake's boathouse so that tourists could make no doubt they had heard the famous "echo;" a small cannon was occasionally discharged for the same purpose." Bierstadt chose not to portray the lake filled with noisy tourists and boats; rather he depicted it as a pristine wilderness, as yet unseen and untouched by humans. Sunlight breaking through the clouds, morning mist rising from the lake, and the sunlit lake shore all seem to suggest a new dawn in the history of man, a new Eden created by God for Americans to live and prosper.