Bierstadt made his first visit to Yosemite Valley in 1863. He was the first painter to give the place serious attention in oil, arriving with a sublime style of mountain painting already established in European Romantic landscape and applying it to the American West^[1]. That vocabulary, dramatic light, a sense of scale meant to overwhelm the viewer, a wilderness untouched by settlement, would define nearly every Yosemite painting Bierstadt made afterward, small or large. Scene in Yosemite Valley, dated 1864, belongs to the group of paintings that came directly out of that first encounter, rather than to the later years when Bierstadt reworked Yosemite material from memory and from photographs long after leaving California. Its date places it early in what became a decades-long return to the subject. Bierstadt would go back to Yosemite repeatedly through the 1870s, but the paintings closest to 1863 carry a directness that the later studio compositions, built from a stock of sketches and photographs rather than from a fresh visit, do not.

Bierstadt worked in two registers that are easy to tell apart once you know to look for them. On one side were the small oils and sketches he made quickly, in the field or shortly after returning from it: modest in size, loosely handled, closer to notes than finished statements. On the other were the large exhibition canvases he built later in his studio, sometimes years afterward, worked up for public display and sale. Contemporaries found the scale of these bigger pictures remarkable enough to joke about; Bierstadt's wall-sized paintings reportedly ran as large as a rug nine feet by twelve, and one running joke held that his next subject would be "all outdoors"^[2]. The Dayton Art Institute places Scene in Yosemite Valley in the first category, closer to a study than to Bierstadt's largest work. Given its 1864 date, that fits a painting made relatively soon after the 1863 trip, before Bierstadt had built up the stock of source material and the studio routine that produced his most famous, much larger Yosemite canvases later in the decade.