Download Beautiful Panoramic Paintings of U.S. National Parks by H.C. Berann: Maps That Look Even More Vivid Than the Real Thing

The Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks have been inspir­ing artists even before they were offi­cial­ly declared nation­al parks. That goes not just for Amer­i­can artists such as the mas­ter land­scape pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ansel Adams, but for­eign artists as well. Take the Aus­tri­an painter Hein­rich C. Berann, described by his offi­cial web site as “the father of the mod­ern panora­ma map,” a dis­tinc­tive form that allowed him to hybridize “old Euro­pean paint­ing tra­di­tion with mod­ern car­tog­ra­phy.”

Berann found his way to car­tog­ra­phy after win­ning a com­pe­ti­tion to paint a map of Aus­tri­a’s Gross­glock­n­er High Alpine Road, which opened in 1934, a cou­ple years after Beran­n’s grad­u­a­tion from art school. “In the fol­low­ing years,” says the artist’s bio, “he improved this tech­nique, cre­at­ed the mod­ern panora­ma map and became famous all over the world for his maps that are in a class of their own.” Maps in a class of their own need geo­graph­i­cal sub­jects in a class of their own, and Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks fit that bill neat­ly.

Beran­n’s panora­mas of Denali, North Cas­cades, Yel­low­stone, and Yosemite “were cre­at­ed in the 1980s and 90s as part of a poster pro­gram to pro­mote the nation­al parks,” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Bet­sy Mason. Just a few years ago, U.S. Nation­al Park Ser­vice senior car­tog­ra­ph­er Tom Pat­ter­son got to work on scan­ning the art­works in high res­o­lu­tion. When the project was com­plete, “the Nation­al Park Ser­vice released the new images on their new­ly redesigned online map por­tal, which also has more than a thou­sand maps that are freely avail­able for the pub­lic to down­load.”

Beran­n’s 1994 paint­ing of Denali Nation­al Park just above was his final work before retire­ment. It came at the end of a long and var­ied career in art that saw him paint not just the Alps, the Himalayas, the Vir­gin Islands, and the floor of the Pacif­ic Ocean (as well as oth­er impres­sive parts of the world under com­mis­sion from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic soci­ety and six dif­fer­ent Olympic Games) but trav­el posters and draw­ings of every­thing from land­scapes to por­traits to nudes.

But it is Beran­n’s panoram­ic paint­ings of Amer­i­ca’s nation­al parks, which you can down­load in high res­o­lu­tion here, that have done the most to make peo­ple see their sub­jects in a new way. Not least because, with an artis­tic sleight-of-hand that com­bines as many land­marks as pos­si­ble into sin­gle vis­tas ren­dered with a strik­ing­ly wide range of col­ors, Berann pro­vides them a series of van­tage points entire­ly unavail­able in real life. In one sense, these are all real nation­al parks, but they’re nation­al parks cap­tured in a way even Ansel Adams nev­er could have done.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Browse & Down­load 1,198 Free High Res­o­lu­tion Maps of U.S. Nation­al Parks

Down­load 100,000 Pho­tos of 20 Great U.S. Nation­al Parks, Cour­tesy of the U.S. Nation­al Park Ser­vice

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Down­load Icon­ic Nation­al Park Fonts: They’re Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Use

Yosemite Nation­al Park in All of Its Time-Lapse Splen­dor

Artist Re-Envi­sions Nation­al Parks in the Style of Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth Maps

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.