“But works of nature, the landmarks erected by the eternal elements; can these be obliterated? Have they any past which the artist can preserve for coming generations? Let this picture decide. Here are the Falls of St. Anthony, as they roared to an untenanted solitude in the year 1853, when George Catlin visited and sketched them. Who would recognize their identity between that fair wild scene and the Falls of St Anthony today.”

Painted only a few years before Matthews’ lecture, Bierstadt’s elegiac image of The Falls of St. Anthony reflects the same sense of lost wilderness and time. It is an imagined scene, of “fair wild” nature as Claudian arcadia, with its hazy golden light, conventional framing trees and pensive figures at the left. Unlike Catlin, Bierstadt saw the Falls long after the “untenanted” landscape had become memory. By the time he visited Minnesota in the 1880s, they were surrounded by the burgeoning city of Minneapolis. Their exaggerated scale here probably reflects the ambition of Bierstadt’s instincts as well as memories of Niagara Falls which he first saw in 1869.