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Beam (y1940-430)","displaydate":"1875","medium":"Oil on canvas","media":[{"id":226878,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039363","isprimary":0,"rank":6,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226879,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039366","isprimary":0,"rank":7,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226880,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039367","isprimary":0,"rank":8,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226881,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039368","isprimary":0,"rank":9,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226882,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039376","isprimary":0,"rank":10,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226883,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039345","isprimary":1,"rank":1,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226884,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039351","isprimary":0,"rank":5,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226885,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039355","isprimary":0,"rank":2,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226886,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039357","isprimary":0,"rank":3,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"},{"id":226887,"uri":"https://media.artmuseum.princeton.edu/iiif/3/collection/PUAMSTU2039358","isprimary":0,"rank":4,"mediatypeid":1,"mediaviewtype":"(not assigned)","restrictions":null,"caption":"PUAM Photo"}],"displayperiod":null,"extended_content":true,"campuscollections":"false","bibliography":[{"boilertext":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013)","citation":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 245","date":2013,"id":1994,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/865020505"},{"boilertext":"F. J. Mather, \"American paintings at Princeton University,\" Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 2, no. 2 (1943): p. 2-15.","citation":"F. J. Mather, \"American paintings at Princeton University,\" Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 2, no. 2 (1943): p. 2-15., p. 10","date":1943,"id":3193,"uri":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774197"},{"boilertext":"Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986)","citation":"Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 277 (illus.)","date":1986,"id":1899,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/14244748"},{"boilertext":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007)","citation":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 231","date":2007,"id":474,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/191864564"},{"boilertext":"Barbara T. Ross, \"Nineteenth-century American landscape paintings: nine recent acquisitions\", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 44, no. 1 (1985): p. 4-13.","citation":"Barbara T. Ross, \"Nineteenth-century American landscape paintings: nine recent acquisitions\", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 44, no. 1 (1985): p. 4-13., p. 13; fig. 16","date":1985,"id":3141,"uri":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774656"}],"nowebuse":"False","periods":[],"department":"American Art","attribute_groups":[{"id":2199325,"term":"North American Art","termtype":"Collecting Area"}],"daterange":"A.D. 1850-1900","dateend":1875,"depicted":[],"titles":[{"title":"Mount Adams, Washington","titletype":"Primary Title","displayorder":1}],"hasimage":"true","creditlinerepro":"","objectnumber":"y1940-430","inscribed":null,"texts":[{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Provenance","textentryhtml":"Possibly in a private collection in Washington (D.C.), by 1872 [1]. Acquired by Mary Prince (1874-1944; also known as Mrs. Jacob Newton Beam and, previously, as Mrs. Willard Humphreys), by 1911; donated to the Princeton University Art Museum, by 1911 [2].\n\n[1] G. Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, New York 1973, p. 242-243 mentions that although this painting is clearly dated 1875, a work of a similar title and size was in a private collection in Washington, D.C., by 1872. Perhaps this is the same painting, and it was only dated several years after its completion.\n[2] The Museum’s inventory card mentions that the painting was recorded in an insurance document from that year.","remarks":null},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Handbook Entry","textentryhtml":"\r\nLike Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt enjoyed great success in the years surrounding the Civil War, producing finely detailed vistas of nature’s splendor in majestic canvases that were similarly invested with significance beyond their surface appearance. The first technically advanced artist to portray the American West, Bierstadt offered to a rapidly transforming nation pictures whose spectacular size and fresh, dramatic subject matter supplied a visual correlative to notions of American exceptionalism, while also contributing to the developing concept of Manifest Destiny. Trained in the highly finished manner of the Düsseldorf Academy, Bierstadt’s precise style imbued his works with a reassuring sense of veracity despite their sublime subjects and occasional liberties with geographic reality. In Mount Adams, Washington, he characteristically combined an impressively scaled natural background with a foreground view of American Indian life, which serves to heighten the picture’s putative realism even as it enhances its exotic appeal. The implied movement of the clouds and the sunlit figures on horseback similarly off to the right seems to open up the depicted space for the viewer to inhabit, providing an apt pictorial metaphor for the actual occupation and exploitation of the West by the eastern interests that constituted the artist’s clientele.

","remarks":null},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Campus Voices","textentryhtml":"

This painting was made at a time of great change for the American environment, shortly following the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad and around the onset of widespread industrialization. Bierstadt painted, in part, to encourage the migration of East Coast Americans to the West, symbolically shown with Native Americans leaving the majestic scene to make space for white settlers. He also inadvertently captured a time in which ecosystems began to experience dramatic change, including species migration due to shifts in climate, and deforestation spurred by growing numbers of settlers.

\r\n

Catherine Riihimaki, Associate Director, Science Education, Council on Science and Technology
 

\r\n

 

","remarks":"Migrations Faculty Voices "},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Gallery Label","textentryhtml":"Bierstadt enjoyed great success in the years surrounding the Civil War, producing finely detailed vistas of nature’s splendor in majestic canvases that were invested with a significance beyond their surface appearance. The first technically advanced artist to portray the American West, Bierstadt offered—to a rapidly transforming nation—pictures whose spectacular size and fresh, dramatic subject matter supplied visual affirmation of Americans’ perceived exceptionalism. Trained in the highly finished manner of the Düsseldorf Academy, Bierstadt employed a precise style that imbued his works with a reassuring aura of veracity and disguised frequent liberties with geographic reality. Here the exaggerated peak is separated from the arable meadow below by a mist, which seems to move toward the right, drawing the Indigenous figures with it. Bierstadt thus suggests the complicity of nature itself in clearing the way for other white settlers in a pictorial expression of the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny.\n","remarks":"AMER2_23-27_WLA Day 1 Cataloguing"}],"datebegin":1875,"sortnumber":"1940 430y","published_date":"2026-02-11 09:38:30.602154","objectid":21699,"dimensions":"138 x 213 cm. (54 5/16 x 83 7/8 in.)\r\nframe: 180 × 255.7 × 15.5 cm (70 7/8 × 100 11/16 × 6 1/8 in.)","on_view":true}