Visitors to the Seattle Art Museum's new show of 19th- and early 20th-century landscape painting and photography, Beauty and Bounty, enter through visions of Eden. Albert Bierstadt's painting of Yosemite is bathed in a golden evening light like a dessert wine poured across the canvas, with deer standing peacefully at the water's edge. Much of the show follows this beatific vision of the unspoiled wilderness — although Bierstadt and other artists certainly had a sense that they'd better see and record it quickly, before it was spoiled.

The paintings and photographs at SAM represent quite an all-star cast. The room that displays paintings of the Hudson River school, includes
a John Frederick  Kensett view of Narragansett Bay (for the geographically challenged, think Newport, Rhode Island near the mouth, and Providence at the head), works by Church and Cole, two images of Niagara Falls, and lakes Placid and George. Later on, you see Carleton Watkins' stark photo of Cape Horn at the west end of the Columbia Gorge, taken when the river was still a river, not a series of lakes backed up behind hydro dams, and the views of Yosemite that made him the 19th-century Ansel Adams. You also see Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, with Yellowstone Falls tumbling from pale cliffs — a smaller version of his best-known work.

At least on the surface, most of the works present a peaceful view of the country that was going through rapid industrialization, pitched battles over labor organizing, the rise of Jim Crow legislation, and the Civil War. The water is dead calm in Sanford Robinson Gifford's 1875 view of Mount Rainier looming over Commencement Bay with two Indian canoes in the foreground. 

But the mood grows less idyllic when you get to Darius Kinsey's great black-and-white photographs of early 20-century loggers, the big trees they cut, and the clearcut wastelands they left behind. None of the artists painting or photographing the Northwest before Kinsey focuses on the trees. They do mountains. They do water. They do mountains and water. They do not do the forests that awed visitors and fed the region's economy.

Things aren't too peaceful either in the centerpiece of the exhibit — SAM's own Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, painted by Bierstadt in 1870. Native fishermen have drawn and are drawing their dugout canoes onto a strip of beach beneach a rocky outcrop, while filtered sunlight shines on the pale granite slope of a mountain rising directly from a further curve of the beach. Offshore, to the right, a great wave swells beheath a dark, stormy sky.

This clearly isn't Puget Sound. Indeed, curator Patricia Junker explains in the exhibit's catalog that it's actually Baker Bay on the Columbia River, just upstream from Cape Disappointment. In 1863 Bierstadt spent 20 hours on a San Francisco-bound steamer here, waiting out a Pacific storm. But it's not really Baker Bay, either. It incorporates things that Bierstadt may have sketched in Yosemite, elements he may have seen in Japanese prints.

"A large studio production like Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast is a synthesis of information provided by the artist's field sketches, his studio models . . . and popular print and text references such as [James] Swan's authoritative guide  The Northwest Coast, Or, Three Years' Residence in Washington Territory to the landscape and people's of the Northwest coast," curator Patricia Junker writes in the catalog. She believes the wave in the piece may be a "highly informed quotation from the work of Hokusai, newly popular among the New York art elite at this time."

"I'm convinced that he's looking at [Hokusai's] Great Wave, she says.

This may not be a painting of any recognizable place, but it is based on recognizable details. To suggest where he might have found the details of the native fishermen, the exhibit includes two small model dugout canoes from Bierstadt's private collection.

Junker, who recently won the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award for scholarship in the field of American art history, has devoted the entire catalog to an essay on Bierstadt's "Puget Sound." Why the narrow focus?

Bierstadt was an iconic figure of 19th century western landscape. His career is well known, she explains, but no one had ever researched this painting or this stage of his life. She herself spends her working life compiling thick files on individual paintings, and enjoys the opportunity to actually use that information.

Ever since she arrived here four years ago, Junker has thought about exhibiting Puget Sound on the Pacific Coast, along with a few other contemporary paintings. When the Museum of Modern Art put together a show of western photography, she considered bringing it here and showing the Bierstadt as part of the package. But she decided that the show was — not surprisingly, given its origin — "too New-York-centric."

Next, Junker wanted to show the Bierstadt with a small supporting cast of other works. SAM's former director, Derrick Cartwright, said he liked the idea, but that she should broaden it, drawing the additional works entirely from local sources. It turns out that there are a lot of local sources. Most of the works in Beauty and Bounty come from private collections in this area, and some have never been seen publicly before.

In addition to broadening the show, "Derrick and [SAM board president Maggie Walker] had this idea about landscape and the environment," Junker explains. They saw a connection. SAM's 1998 exhibit of Thomas Moran's paintings packed in the visitors, and programs built around the Moran show that touched on preserving the land were especially popular. Based on that history, "there was a thought that this really had resonance" in the Seattle community. Junker herself thought it was a nice idea, but she was a bit skeptical about the connection. 

That is until she began reading about the late-19th- and early-20th-century argument between John Muir and Gifford Pinchot about the fate of the nation's forests. Muir wanted to save them as wilderness. Pinchot wanted to log them sustainably. Seen against that background, the Darius Kinsey photographs of early 20th-century logging had real environmental significance, though neither Muir nor Pinchot advocated the kind of take-no-prisoners clearcutting that Kinsey documented. Loggers left slash on the ground, hauled out the big trees and moved on. Land owners didn't replant, and stopped paying taxes. Fires roared through the slash. County governments took over acres of charred stumps. People with a thought beyond tomorrow started worrying about the future of Washington's timber supply. Once Junker started thinking in those terms, she realized that much of the exhibit was tied to the start of the environmental movement.

Some of the connections require a bit of conjecture: Junker suggests that a mid 19th-century painting of a pristine Niagara Falls may have been a subtle comment on the tawdry commercialism that surrounded the falls at that time. Other connections can be made with a good deal of hindsight: Take Cleveland Rockwell's 1882 scene on the Columbia River, where a little rowboat has pulled a fishing net almost all the way across the stream. By that time, guys fishing from little boats had already started taking a toll on the Columbia's salmon runs — although most people were quick to deny the reality of what was going on. One late 19th-century visitor commented that every bit of the Columbia seemed to be strained through fishing nets, and it was a wonder that any salmon got through.