Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
1830 - 1902
American painter of German birth. In a career spanning the entire second half of the 19th century, Bierstadt emerged as the first technically sophisticated artist to travel to the Far West of America, adapt European and Hudson River School prototypes to a new landscape and produce paintings powerful in their nationalistic and religious symbolism.
Bierstadt spent his early years in New Bedford, MA, where his family settled two years after his birth. Lacking funds for formal art instruction, he spent several years as an itinerant drawing instructor before departing in 1853 for Düsseldorf, Germany, where he hoped to study with JOHANN PETER HASENCLEVER, a distant relative and a celebrated member of the Düsseldorf art circle. Hasenclever’s death shortly before Bierstadt’s arrival altered the course of his study, for rather than finding German mentors, he responded to the generous assistance offered by fellow American artists EMANUEL LEUTZE and WORTHINGTON WHITTREDGE. After four years of study and travel in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, he had achieved a remarkable level of technical expertise. In 1857, his apprenticeship complete, he returned to New Bedford. The following year he made his New York début contributing a large painting, Lake Lucerne (1858; Washington, DC, N.G.A.), to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design.
The turning point in his career came in 1859 when he obtained permission to travel west with Frederick W. Lander’s Honey Road Survey Party. Bierstadt accompanied the expedition as far as South Pass, high in the Rocky Mountains, not only making sketches, but also taking stereoscopic photographs of Indians, emigrants and members of the survey party. On his return east, Albert gave his negatives to his brothers Charles Bierstadt (1819–1903) and Edward Bierstadt (1824–1906), who shortly thereafter opened their own photography business. Albert himself, after taking space in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, set to work on the first of the large western landscapes on which he built his reputation. In 1860 he exhibited Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak (untraced) at the National Academy of Design and thereby laid artistic claim to the landscape of the American West. Of all the paintings he produced following his first trip west, none drew more attention than The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863; New York, Met.). A huge landscape combining distant mountain grandeur with a close-up view of Indian camp life, The Rocky Mountains was seen by some as the North American equivalent of Frederic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes (1859; New York, Met.).
In 1863 Bierstadt made his second trip west, accompanied by the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Travelling by stagecoach and on horseback, the pair reached San Francisco in July, spent seven weeks in Yosemite Valley and then rode north as far as the Columbia River in Oregon before returning east. Following this trip, Bierstadt produced a series of paintings that took as their subject the awesome geography and spiritual power of Yosemite Valley. Such images of undisturbed nature served as welcome antidotes to the chaos and carnage of the Civil War then ravaging the eastern landscape. In 1865 Bierstadt sold The Rocky Mountains to James McHenry, an English railroad financier, for $25,000. The sale marked not only the artist’s economic ascendancy but also his entry into European and American society. At the peak of his fame and wealth, Bierstadt built a magnificent home, Malkasten, on the banks of the Hudson River. He continued to produce large paintings of western mountain scenery, including Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt Rosalie (1866; New York, Brooklyn Mus. A.) and Domes of the Yosemite (1867; St Johnsbury, VT, Athenaeum).
In June 1867 Bierstadt and his wife departed for Europe, where they spent two years travelling and mixing with potential patrons among the wealthy and titled. In Rome during the winter of 1868 he completed Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.), a key example of the mythic rather than topographical paintings that would occupy much of his time during the 1870s. In 1871 he returned to California and Yosemite, but the transcontinental railroad had flooded the valley with tourists, and he turned his attention to less accessible and still pristine areas such as Hetch Hetchy Valley, Kings River Canyon and the Farallon Islands. Returning east in 1873, he began work on a new series of paintings of California, as well as a commissioned work for the US Capitol, the Discovery of the Hudson (1875; in situ). In 1877, when his wife’s health required a warmer climate, he began regular trips to Nassau. The island’s lush landscape and tropical light offered new subject matter and encouraged him to adopt a brighter palette. In the following decade he travelled constantly, returning to Europe, California, Canada and the Pacific Northwest. In 1881 he visited Yellowstone Park and eight years later Alaska and the Canadian Rockies.
The growing American taste for paintings exhibiting French mood rather than German drama, on an intimate rather than a panoramic scale, had begun to affect Bierstadt’s reputation as early as the mid-1870s, but the most painful blow came in 1889 when his ambitious western canvas, the Last of the Buffalo (1888; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.), was rejected by an American selection committee for the Paris Exposition Universelle. Declaring the canvas too large and not representative of contemporary American art, the committee reinforced the view that Bierstadt was an outmoded master. The revival of interest in Bierstadt’s work in the 1960s was sparked not by the large studio paintings celebrated during the 1860s and 1870s, but rather by the fresh, quickly executed sketches done as preparatory works for the larger compositions. [Nancy Anderson. "Bierstadt, Albert." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T008819.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
