The Grizzly Giant Sequoia, Mariposa Grove, California

Painted in 1876 and held at LACMA in Los Angeles, this work by Albert Bierstadt depicts the Grizzly Giant—one of the oldest and most massive giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove in what is now Yosemite National Park. Bierstadt had visited Yosemite several times from the 1860s onward, and his monumental landscapes of California scenery helped create the popular image of the American West as a land of sublime, God-given grandeur. The giant sequoias, with their incomparable scale and extreme age, were among the most potent symbols of American nature's divine amplitude, and Bierstadt renders the Grizzly Giant as a vertical monument of natural sublimity.

The giant sequoia's enormous trunk fills the composition's vertical axis, its reddish-brown bark contrasted against the misty depths of the grove. Bierstadt achieves his characteristic luminous effect through the interplay of dappled light and atmospheric depth, the tree's scale established by the tiny human figures that appear dwarfed at its base.