Sudden and solitary

SUDDEN AND SOLITARY presents more than 150 years of artwork by the many visionary artists, past and present, big and small, who have been inspired by Mount Shasta. The mountain's grand beauty has called to a myriad of artists, from early California painters Albert Bierstadt and William Keith, to modern masters of photography such as Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Michael Kenna. As the authors state in the introduction, this book is an "attempt to characterize what Mount Shasta meant to the nineteenth-century American and Californian, and how those ideas have evolved in the visual arts up to the present." There are many mountains in the West, but few offer the experience that Shasta does of being in a place apart and unique; it is no surprise that it has generated an artistic legacy of such grandeur.