Lives of a Painting

From one owner to another, from exhibition to auction, through years of adulation and years of neglect, a painting can endure a life of its own. Some lives are more exciting than others. Such is the case with Albert Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, a monumental work measuring over five feet by eight feet in the collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art. How it arrived at the Alabama museum is a story involving shady finances, public charity, and a historic escape from destruction. Bierstadt painted Looking Down Yosemite Valley in 1865 toward the end of the Civil War. I...