Autumn Woods, Albert Bierstadt, Oil on linen, roughly 54 x 94 in. Link is to image page on Visual Elsewhere, large image here. Original is in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.
I had the pleasure of seeing thie painting in person a few yars ago in a show of Hudson River School paintings at the Allentown, PA Art Museum.
At four and a half by almost eight feet, it’s a large painting and wonderfully immersive when you stand in front of it.
Beautiful fall colors and detailed naturalism aside, look for a minute at the values (light and dark) in this painting, how Bierstadt controls your gaze and immediately pulls you back into the distance.
To show how dramatic this effect is, and how it depends much more on value than color, I’ve converted the painting to grayscale in the images above. Look at how the line of trees on the left is almost a gradient of dark to light, sliding your eye into the gap between the trees.
The foreground darks, which are, if you think about it, quite dark for an otherwise sunny day, form a kind of u-shaped cup filled with sky into which we delightedly tumble.
While we’re back there, we can stop and apperciate the artist’s masterful application of atmospheric perspective, much of which is also due to control of values.
There is a saying among painters: “Value does the work; color gets the credit.”
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