Alfonso Almendros
“To Name a Mountain”
Casa dos Crivos

Alfonso Almendros

To Name a Mountain

In the spring of 1863, the landscaper Albert Bierstadt, undertook his second trip through the Rocky Mountains with his friend the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow.  History says that during the trip, the sight of a huge mountain dazzled the painter. Immediately he made a sketch where a dark and greyish storm crosses an imaginary horizon of enormous peaks. Bierstadt titled his work “A storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mount Rosalie” in honour of his expedition partner’s wife. The resulting work was interpreted as a representation of the emotional torment in which Bierstadt was, and the mountain, nameless to date, was renamed Mount Rosalie in honour of the woman Bierstadt secretly loved.  Bierstadt fame was fleeting. His work seems to talk about desire but always through excess and transgression of the truth and the reasonable. His conception about beauty seems to oscillate between the sublime and the biased. Isn’t it boldness and a frustration, in equal parts, trying to reach a high peak? In spite of this, the act of naming a mountain is a fact filled with poetry. Talks about the desire of possession and permanence. Reminds us, through the creation, the memory of those which we love.