The National Gallery of Art needed 50 years to acquire its first painting by landscape artist Albert Bierstadt, and it arrived wrapped in a mystery.
Bierstadt's monumental canvas "Lake Lucerne" disappeared more than a century ago. Scholars knew of its existence from 19th-century newspaper accounts, but they could never find any photographs or other illustrations of the work.The 1858 landscape, one of Bierstadt's early masterpieces, was feared lost or destroyed. Then last year, lawyers taking an inventory of an Exeter, R.I., woman's estate found "Lake Lucerne" hanging in the second-floor bedroom of her modest home.
The picture, which measures 6 by 10 feet, later was bought at auction by Richard Mellon Scaife and Margaret R. Battle of Pittsburgh, who gave it to the National Gallery in celebration of the gallery's 50th anniversary this year.
The painting went on display last month at the National Gallery, joining a retrospective of Bierstadt works that previously appeared at the Brooklyn Museum and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.
"Lake Lucerne" thus was reunited with another Bierstadt painting, "Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California," for the first time since 1882. That is when the two paintings were dispersed at an auction after the death of their original owner, Boston collector Alvin Adams.
The California painting eventually entered the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, but the Swiss landscape's whereabouts were unknown until last year.
National Gallery director J. Carter Brown hailed his institution's first Bierstadt as the crucial "missing link" between the European and American phases of the artist's career.
Born in Germany, Bierstadt was a prominent 19th-century American artist best known for his panoramic paintings of the Western wilderness, especially scenes of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite.
The exhibition's works all were drawn from museums and private collections in the United States. Several were lent by the Smithsonian and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, which already had acquired several major Bierstadt works before the National Gallery was founded in 1941.