Traveling by rail, trail, horseback, and steamship, New York painter Albert Bierstadt first visited the Pacific Northwest 1863 in search of new scenery. Yosemite and Yellowstone were already claimed. The frontier—soon bridged by transcontinental railroad—was closing. He wanted something spectacular to paint. And his companion, journalist Fitz Hugh Ludlow, was also in search of stories to sell. The latter is now forgotten, while Bierstadt is at the center of SAM’s ongoing “Beauty & Bounty” landscape show. Today the museum’s curator Patricia Junker, author of Albert Bierstadt: Puget Sound on the Puget Coast: A Superb View of Dreamland (SAM/UW Press, $19.95), will likely mention their divergent fortunes. Bierstadt would go on to paint the SAM show’s mammoth centerpiece, unveiled in 1870. Ludlow died that same year, aged 34, when his book about their seven-month journey together was also published. Curiously, he omitted the name of his intimate traveling companion. That was because Bierstadt had in the interim stolen his wife, married her, and enjoyed national acclaim for his depiction of a very fanciful Puget Sound. Ludlow, a bohemian, abolitionist, and drug addict, was also given to ecstatic visions, but no one reads his stories anymore. A friend of Whitman and Twain, he died poor and obscure, while Bierstadt lived long enough (1830-1902) to savor his own obsolescence. Somewhere today, a playwright is considering their voyage together … Al and Fitz in a Canoe, anyone? BRIAN MILLER

Wed., Aug. 17, 7 p.m., 2011