North Dome, Yosemite Valley. Albert Bierstadt · Public domain · source

Albert Bierstadt

Public domain1830-1902·American·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Solingen, in Prussia's Rhine Province, on 7 January 1830; his family emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was a year old. In 1859 he went west with the government surveyor Frederick W. Lander, and again in 1863 with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. He died in New York City on 18 February 1902.

Why they matter

He sold the American West to the East as spectacle: the Rockies and Yosemite on canvases many feet wide, built up in the New York studio from sketches made on the spot and freely rearranged. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak was bought in 1865 for a very large sum, and his career shows how quickly that taste turned: by his death, epic landscape had long gone out of fashion.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which owns The Last of the Buffalo, prints it to order on paper and frames it as you choose, from its own photography; that is the museum-made route to a Bierstadt on the wall. Books: Albert Bierstadt: Art & Enterprise (1990) by Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber, published by the Brooklyn Museum with Hudson Hills Press for the retrospective that opened there in 1991, is the standard book; look for it secondhand. Originals: not realistic. The big canvases are in museums. The period print to know is Louis Prang's 1868 chromolithograph of his Sunset (California Scenery), printed from as many as nineteen stones in oil-based colours whose raised surface was meant to pass for paint; the Library of Congress holds one. That is also the warning: a framed "Bierstadt oil" with no provenance may be a Prang chromo, or a later copy, and wants an expert's eye before any money changes hands.

Notes

A fire in 1882 destroyed his studio at Irvington, New York, and many paintings with it. In 1889 the American committee choosing works for the Paris Exposition Universelle rejected The Last of the Buffalo; it later went to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in 1909, as a gift of his widow, Mary Stewart Bierstadt, and has been at the National Gallery of Art since 2014. The US Postal Service put The Last of the Buffalo on a stamp in 1998.

Story

In April 1863 Bierstadt left New York for the West again, this time with Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the bestselling author of The Hasheesh Eater. Ludlow had married Rosalie Osborne in 1859. In the Colorado Rockies, Bierstadt christened a high peak Mount Rosalie, after his travelling companion's wife. Back in his New York studio he worked his sketches from the trip into A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, a canvas nearly seven feet by twelve that combines features he had drawn in different places into one invented view. It went on show on 7 February 1866. By then Rosalie was his lover, and the painting carried her name in its title; she left Ludlow, and on 21 November 1866 she married Bierstadt. The mountain did not keep her name. It became Mount Evans, after John Evans, the second territorial governor of Colorado, and on 15 September 2023 the United States Board on Geographic Names renamed it Mount Blue Sky, because of Evans's part in the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre. A lower summit three miles to the southeast is called Rosalie Peak. The painting itself has been at the Brooklyn Museum since 1976.

Key works

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863) - The Met, New York
Valley of the Yosemite (1864) - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866) - Brooklyn Museum, New York
Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868) - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
The Last of the Buffalo (1888) - National Gallery of Art, Washington

Albert Bierstadt

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also