Sketch of Mountain Scenery (from Sketchbook) 1890

Curator: Albert Bierstadt, of the Hudson River School, created this work entitled "Sketch of Mountain Scenery (from Sketchbook)" around 1890. The medium is graphite pencil on paper, currently held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. What's your immediate impression? Editor: Ghostly. Almost like a memory fading into the page. The stark lines suggest something immense, but the delicacy…it feels transient. Curator: It speaks to Bierstadt’s artistic project more broadly, as his art served as propaganda for westward expansion. He emphasized nature as untouched to motivate such actions while concealing violent territorial erasure. In other words, it is a political project hiding behind this idea of landscape. Editor: Wow. I felt a quiet stillness looking at this. So the "stillness" is the erasure. It’s chilling how a simple sketch can hold so much weight, but the lack of detail almost amplifies the emptiness that it conceals, doesn't it? Curator: Exactly! And the sketch is part of the larger project to naturalize a national identity connected to notions of discovery. This drawing normalizes such enterprises by hiding these historical dynamics behind claims to landscape painting. Editor: Right, because by framing it as simply landscape, you sidestep a lot of complex moral and political questions. That initial gentleness I perceived… it was a smokescreen. It feels incomplete because perhaps it deliberately avoids any hint of what happened there to solidify what it means to expand territory in America. Curator: The Hudson River School sought to establish a clear distinction between the old world and this “new” place, and it is important to think through how even a sketch functions to facilitate such a nationalist and expansionist narrative. Editor: To think it’s a loaded, quiet thing! It reveals to me, how the "nothingness" is the most impactful message, if you are sensitive enough to detect it. A valuable, painful lesson, in perception.