Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American artist best known for his monumental landscapes that glorified the American West.
Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany and emigrated with his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts at age two. In 1853, Bierstadt traveled to Germany to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. On his return, Bierstadt became part of the second generation of landscape artists associated with the Hudson River School in New York. Bierstadt's travels to Colorado and Wyoming territories in 1859 shifted his artistic focus to the American West. He joined geographical and geological surveys to document scenery. The grand, theatrical vistas he painted of the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and Yosemite Valley brought acclaim and made Bierstadt a financial success, yet also drew criticism when tastes and perspectives shifted.
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Early life and education
Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Rhine Province, Prussia, on January 7, 1830. He was the son of Christina M. (Tillmans) and Henry Bierstadt, a cooper. His older brothers were prominent stereo view photographers Edward Bierstadt and Charles Bierstadt. Albert was just a year old when his family emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1831. He made clever crayon sketches in his youth and developed a taste for art.
In 1851, Bierstadt began to paint in oils. He returned to Germany in 1853 and studied painting for several years in Düsseldorf with members of its informal school of painting. After returning to New Bedford in 1857, he taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself full-time to painting.
Career
In 1858, Bierstadt exhibited a large painting of a Swiss landscape at the National Academy of Design, which gained him positive critical reception and honorary membership of the Academy. Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River Valley. He was part of a group of artists known as the Hudson River School.
In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those western American landscapes for his work. He returned to a studio he had taken at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York with sketches for numerous paintings he then finished. In 1860, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany.
In 1863, Bierstadt traveled west again, this time with the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he later married. The pair spent seven weeks in the Yosemite Valley. Throughout the 1860s, Bierstadt used studies from this trip as the source for large-scale exhibition paintings and he continued to visit the American West throughout his career. The immense canvases he produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the western American landscape. Bierstadt's technical proficiency, earned through his study of European landscape, was crucial to his success as a painter of the American West and accounted for his popularity in disseminating views of the Rocky Mountains to those who had not seen them.
During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), Bierstadt was drafted in 1863 and paid for a substitute to serve in his place. By 1862, he had completed one Civil War painting Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War based on his brief experiences with soldiers stationed at Camp Cameron in 1861. That painting was based on a stereoscopic photograph taken by his brother Edward Bierstadt, who operated a photography studio at Langley's Tavern in Virginia. The painting received a positive review when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 1861. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey observed that the painting, created from photographs, "is quintessentially that of a voyeur, privy to the stories and unblemished by the violence and brutality of first-hand combat experience."
Financial recognition confirmed his status: The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, completed in 1863, was purchased for $25,000 in 1865, the equivalent of almost $400,000 in 2020.
Posthumous reception
Interest in Bierstadt's work was renewed in the 1960s with the exhibition of his small oil studies. Modern opinions of Bierstadt have been divided. Some critics have regarded his work as gaudy, oversized, extravagant champions of Manifest Destiny. Others have noted that his landscapes helped create support for the conservation movement and the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. His work has been placed in a favorable context, as stated in 1987:
The temptation (to criticize him) should be steadfastly resisted. Bierstadt's theatrical art, fervent sociability, international outlook, and unquenchable personal energy reflected the epic expansion in every facet of Western civilization during the second half of the nineteenth century.
On the other hand, his work has also been criticized as largely an imaginary depiction of nature, and even "soulless" in its execution.
Existing work
1853 – Majesty of the Mountains
1855 – The Old Mill
1855 – The Portico of Octavia
1855 – Westphalia
1858 – Lake Lucerne, c. 1853, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
1859 – The Wolf River, Kansas, c. 1859, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan
1861 – Echo Lake, Franconia Mountains, NH, Smith College Museum of Art, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
1863 – The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York
1864 – Cho-looke, the Yosemite Fall, oil on canvas, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, California
1864 – Valley of the Yosemite, oil on paper, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
1865 – Looking Down Yosemite Valley, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama
1866 – Yosemite Valley, Oil on canvas on panel-back stretcher, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
1866 – On the Hudson River Near Irvington, 1866–70, oil on paper, Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts
1866 – A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, New York City, New York
Legacy and honors
Because of Bierstadt's interest in mountain landscapes, Mount Bierstadt and Bierstadt Lake in Colorado are named in his honor. Bierstadt was probably the first European to visit the summit of Mount Blue Sky in 1863, 1.5 miles from Mount Bierstadt. Bierstadt named it Mount Rosa, a reference to both Monte Rosa above Zermatt and, Rosalie Ludlow, his future wife, but the name was changed from Rosalie to Evans in 1895 in honor of Colorado governor John Evans, and again in 2023 to Blue Sky.
In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a set of 20 commemorative stamps entitled "Four Centuries of American Art", one of which featured Albert Bierstadt's The Last of the Buffalo. In 2008, the USPS issued a commemorative stamp in its "American Treasures" series featuring Bierstadt's 1864 painting Valley of the Yosemite.
William Bliss Baker, another landscape artist, studied under Bierstadt.
The 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory by Richard Powers credits Bierstadt for the cover art painting with design by Evan Gaffney. Art Resource has catalogged the same painting as "Cathedral Forest" by Bierstadt. The book won an AIGA 50 Covers award.