The Winter Art Show

 

The Prussian-born artist Albert Bierstadt made a pilgrimage to the Rocky Mountains in 1859, gathering material for the heroic Western landscapes that would soon make him famous. Along the way he sketched this threesome tearing into a meal and called the painting Grizzly Bears . Wiser heads have since concluded these are North American black bears, a less ferocious breed, but it hardly matters. Their fluid poses under a stippled, opalescent sky make this twelve-by-sixteen-inch work as impressive in its way as any of Bierstadt’s operatic eleven-foot canvases.