Hudson River School landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was born in Germany, and, though his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was two, he spent many of his formative years in Europe.

[7] In one description of the painting, "Sharply pointed granite peaks and fantastically illuminated clouds float above a tranquil, wooded genre scene.

[11] According to a review in Harper's Weekly from March 26, 1864, Lander's Peak "is purely an American scene, and from the faithful and elaborate delineation of the Indian village, a form of life now rapidly disappearing from the earth, may be called a historic landscape.

"[12] Bierstadt illustrated Shoshone people along with the majestic peaks as a marker of the "sublime" which authors like James Fenimore Cooper, John C. Frémont, and Washington Irving wrote about.

I think that the artist ought to tell his portion of their history as well as the writer; a combination of both will assuredly render it more complete"[15] Bierstadt adds, "We have a great many Indian subjects.

Of course they were astonished when we showed them the pictures they did not sit for; and the best we have taken have been obtained without the knowledge of the parties, which is, in fact the best way to take any portrait"[15] The Shoshone people are depicted on a similar level as the nature of the image.

[6] Bierstadt was a shrewd self-promoter and a gifted artist, and this was the first of his paintings to be widely promoted with a single-picture exhibition accompanied by a pamphlet, engravings, and a tour.

[7] Comparisons were made between Lander's Peak and The Heart of the Andes, a contemporary painting by one of Bierstadt's main rivals in the landscape genre, Frederic Edwin Church.

At the New York Metropolitan Fair in 1864, held by the United States Sanitary Commission to raise money for the Union war effort, the two paintings were exhibited opposite each other.

One such critic complained that it would have been better "if the marks of the brush had, by dexterous handling, been made to stand for scrap and fissure, crag and cranny, but as it is, we have only too little geology and too much bristle.