Redwood Forest Yosemite Valley 19th Century

This is a restored copy of Redwood Forest Yosemite Valley, oil on canvas, circa 1885 by American western landscape painter Gilbert Davis Munger,... more

by Peter Ogden

Title

Redwood Forest Yosemite Valley 19th Century

Artist

Peter Ogden

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

This is a restored copy of Redwood Forest Yosemite Valley, oil on canvas, circa 1885 by American western landscape painter Gilbert Davis Munger, 1837-1903. Note gigantic size of the Redwood trees compared with the two tiny human figures in the lower right foreground.
Gilbert Davis Munger was born on April 14, 1837, in Madison, Connecticut, to Sherman and Lucretia Benton Munger, the last of five children. He was a distant cousin of the American engraver and artist George Munger. When he evinced artistic talent at an early age, his family sent him to Washington, D.C. at the age of just 13 to apprentice with William H. Dougal, who was then senior engraver at the Smithsonian Institution. Among his tasks was to produce engravings for government reports, and he turned out plates of animals, birds, fish, reptiles, and plants related to the scientific work of Louis Agassiz and the explorations of Commodore Charles Wilkes. As a painter, however, he was largely self-taught and was inspired in the development of his style by reading the work of John Ruskin and studying the painters of the Hudson River School. During this period of his life, he began to make friends with other artists, including John Mix Stanley and John Ross Key.
Yosemite National Park is an American national park located in the western Sierra Nevada of Central California bounded on the southeast by Sierra National Forest and on the northwest by Stanislaus National Forest. The park is managed by the National Park Service and covers an area of 748,436 acres (1,169 sq mi; 3,029 km2) and sits in four counties: centered in Tuolumne and Mariposa, extending north and east to Mono and south to Madera County. Designated a World Heritage site in 1984, Yosemite is internationally recognized for its granite cliffs, waterfalls, clear streams, giant sequoia groves, lakes, mountains, meadows, glaciers, and biological diversity. Almost 95% of the park is designated wilderness.

Uploaded

January 9th, 2020