Last updated: February 11, 2022
Person
Albert Bierstadt
Quick Facts
Significance:
American Artist
Place of Birth:
Solingen, Prussia
Date of Birth:
January 7, 1830
Place of Death:
New York City
Date of Death:
February 18, 1902
Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Prussia (modern Germany) on January 7, 1830. At the age of two, his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his father found work as a cooper. Primarily self-taught, Bierstadt advertised his services as a drawing instructor in 1850. Three years later he departed for Europe to obtain formal instruction. Arriving at Dusseldorf, he studied with the American painters Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868) and Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910). After three years, Bierstadt joined Whittredge on an extended sketching tour through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He returned to New Bedford in 1857 a technically mature painter.
He made his New York debut when, in 1858, he contributed a large painting of Lake Lucerne and the Swiss Alps to the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. Critics were favorable, impressed with Bierstadt's technical expertise. Soon after, he was elected an honorary member of the academy.
In 1859, Bierstadt joined Frederick W. Lander's survey party bound for the Rocky Mountains. While on tour, Bierstadt took countless photographs and drafted the many sketches that would become the studies for massive paintings depicting the American west.
Upon his return, Bierstadt moved to New York, established himself in the Tenth Street Studio Building, and began to exhibit his paintings of the west. These canvases, immense in scale and grandiose in effect, would soon make his reputation. Bierstadt exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Boston Art Club. His paintings found their way into public and private collections at staggeringly high prices for his time.
In 1863, Bierstadt traveled to the Pacific Coast where he spent several weeks in Yosemite Valley painting and sketching studies he would later use to compose several of his most important paintings. From California, he continued north through Oregon to the Columbia River, making studies of the landscape. By the end of the decade, Bierstadt completed a remarkable series of large scale paintings that secured his position as the premier painter of the American west.
In 1867 Bierstadt was invited to exhibit two of his most important paintings, privately before Queen Victoria. He remained in Europe for more than two years, traveling, sketching, and cultivating a European market for his work.
In 1871 he returned to California, where he stayed two years, painting views of the Sierra Nevada, including Yosemite. Though Bierstadt continued to maintain his New York studio and travel widely in the, he found new subject matter in the tropics during visits with his wife, who suffered from consumption and was advised to spend winter months in a warm climate.
Bierstadt’s last trip west was in 1889. Changing tastes in the 1880s brought a decline in the popularity of his art, and he narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 1895. His entry for the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris—The Last of the Buffalo—was rejected, described as too large, but more likely judged old-fashioned. This event marked the end of Bierstadt's series of monumental western landscapes. He died suddenly in New York on February 18, 1902, largely forgotten.
Sources
National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum