View of Chimney Rock, Ohalilah Sioux Village in the Foreground

The title of this piece summarises the content perfectly, with two main areas of interest. Albert Bierstadt produced View of Chimney Rock, Ohalilah Sioux Village in the Foreground in around 1860 and it now resides within the Colby College Museum of Art, USA.

Despite being a relatively small artwork, Bierstadt is still able to include fairly precise detail within this composition. This is most evident on the native indians who are to be found in the near foreground. The artist adds touches of white paint to bring out certain elements, including the breaking waves of a relatively calm river. Several people move around the water on horseback, with a god found close by. Some of the women are found carrying out more domestic duties within the village itself. In the far distance we can then see a further sign of life with humans and animals travelling across the horizontal space which lies between the foreground and background. In the far distance is the prominent shape of Chimney Rock, which appears to be fairly solitary, with little else around it. Some further mounds can then be found on the left hand side, though Bierstadt then chooses to devote around half of the millboard to the sky.

This painting can today be found in the Colby College Museum of Art which is based in Waterville, Maine, USA. They currently own around 8,000 items within their collection and that continues to grow annually. Their main focus is on American art, hence the inclusion of Bierstadt, but they also serve Chinese and European art and antiquities well too. We do know that paintings by William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth have also been donated to the institution by generous collectors who have sought to ensure that their carefully crafted collections can be seen by as many people as possible within their own local communities, hence their decision to pass them over to this specific venue.

Another artist to look out for, who might not actually be featured within the Colby College, was Frederic Edwin Church, who gifted us the likes of Mount Ktaadn, Autumn in North America and Storm in the Mountains. He became just as significant as Bierstadt, and whilst their styles were similar, he found his own direction in terms of content and style. The two would provide alternative contributions which really boosted the Hudson River School which was a loose collective of landscape painters within the USA. They became one of the first significant movements from the US which achieved notable success on an international level and remain highly regarded today. Both Church and Bierstadt would also draw attention to the lives of the Native Indians through their work too.