Valley of the Yosemite dates to 1868, five years after Bierstadt's first trip to Yosemite in 1863. By this point in his career, paintings on the subject were typically built in the studio from field sketches and photographs rather than from direct observation, a method Bierstadt relied on once his western travel had given way to a settled routine of studio production back east or in Europe^[2]. At roughly 68.5 by 91.4 centimetres, the Yale canvas sits between the small studies Bierstadt made in or close to 1863 and the very largest exhibition paintings he produced through the 1870s. That middle scale suggests a picture made for sale or display, worked up with more finish than a study, but well short of the scale Bierstadt reserved for his most ambitious public statements, canvases contemporaries joked ran to "all outdoors"^[1]. Bierstadt reused the title Valley of the Yosemite across more than one composition, so this 1868 version needs to be distinguished from other paintings that share its name.

The Yale University Art Gallery holds Valley of the Yosemite under accession number 1971.127.53. It is not currently on view. As with much of Bierstadt's mid-career studio production, the painting reached its present institutional home well after the market for his work had gone through its early-twentieth-century decline and later scholarly recovery. Bierstadt's reputation was largely rebuilt through the work of American art historians across the twentieth century, work that restored painters such as Bierstadt, Fitz Henry Lane, John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church to a settled place in the history of American art rather than leaving them as a period curiosity^[3].