With its frame, The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove measures more than 12 feet tall and weighs nearly 500 pounds. It depicts one of California’s most legendary trees, the Grizzly Giant, in the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in what is now Yosemite National Park.

“Images of the big trees in Yosemite were very popular in the mid-19th century,” said Rebecca Lawton, the Carter’s curator of paintings and sculpture. “Yet, with this work, Bierstadt created the largest painting ever of this subject. He offered viewers the experience of standing in the Mariposa Grove with the giant sequoias towering over them. This painting draws the viewer’s eye up the monumental canvas, and the sense of exhilaration and wonder that it instills is a testament to Bierstadt’s talent and skill.”

Lawton points out that the Carter exhibited the painting in 1972 in a retrospective of Bierstadt’s work, but at the time it was in a narrow, modern frame. “Now, the painting is presented in a replica of a 19th-century gilded frame, the same type the artist chose to display it in originally.”

The Carter’s Bierstadt painting, Sunrise, Yosemite Valley (oil on canvas, ca. 1870), is on permanent display in the museum’s Painting and Sculpture Galleries.