Albert Bierstadt sold the American West to Europe with showman flair
Albert Bierstadt painted the Rockies and Yosemite on canvases so vast and theatrical that audiences bought tickets to see them. One sold in 1865 for $25,000, close to $400,000 in today's money. He even showed his work privately to Queen Victoria, advertising the West as a promised land just as European emigration surged.
Bierstadt was born on January 7, 1830, in Solingen, in Prussia's Rhine Province, the son of a cooper. His family emigrated in 1831 to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was a year old. His older brothers Edward and Charles became well-known makers of stereo photographs, and young Albert showed early promise with crayon sketches. He took up oils in 1851 and in 1853 went back to Germany to study for several years in Düsseldorf. After briefly teaching in New Bedford he committed to painting full time.
A large Swiss landscape shown at the National Academy of Design in 1858 earned him praise and honorary membership. He painted in New England and the Hudson River Valley as part of the Hudson River School's second generation. In 1859 he travelled west with the government surveyor Frederick W. Lander, returned to a studio in New York's Tenth Street Studio Building, and turned his sketches into finished works. A second journey in 1863 with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow included seven weeks in Yosemite; Bierstadt later married Ludlow's wife. The huge paintings from those trips made him the leading painter of the western landscape, his European training giving viewers who had never seen the Rockies a convincing vision of them.
The Civil War touched him only lightly. Drafted in 1863, he paid for a substitute. His one war painting, of guerrilla fighting, was based on a stereoscopic photograph by his brother Edward, and a curator has described its viewpoint as that of a voyeur untouched by real combat.
From 1867 he spent two years in Europe, painting and courting buyers; Among the Sierra Nevada, California was painted in Rome and shown in Berlin and London before crossing the Atlantic. His exhibitions came with promotion and admission fees, which one critic mocked as a vast machinery of advertisement. Those grand vistas later drew criticism as tastes changed. He died on February 18, 1902.
Source: Albert Bierstadt
