Anti-Catholic & Anti-Indigenous: Italy and the West in Albert Bierstadt's Early Career

In 1859, Albert Bierstadt wrote during his first visit to the American West how the region “reminds me very much of some Italian towns [with] so many mules and curious wagons and picturesque dresses.” This paper argues that while Bierstadt first developed an interest in the western regions of the United States while a student in Düsseldorf—a city with a unique cultural fascination for buffalo, the open plains, and Native Americans—Bierstadt’s travel through Italy ultimately informed how he approached western subjects. In media and form, his preparatory drawings and completed paintings reflect a white supremacist perception of supposed geographic and ethnographic similarities between Italy and the West. Thus, Bierstadt’s earliest artworks not only ignore Indigenous sovereignty, but they are also imbued with fears that urban Catholic immigrant populations might also settle in the west, thus displaying the settler colonial project of furthering a white Protestant vision for the nation in the mid-1850s through the 1870s. Examining Bierstadt’s letters and drawings alongside popular novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, this paper recovers how the apparent foreignness of Italy and the American West, of Italians and Native Americans, melded within the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant mindset, transforming the American West into an imaginary site that could affirm White Protestant superiority over indigenous Americans, as well as growing Catholic immigrant populations.