Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

The following essay is from the 1982 publication Dallas Collects American Paintings: Colonial to Early Modern.

Albert Bierstadt was born near Düsseldorf, Germany, and brought by his parents to New Bedford, Massachusetts, at age two. By 1850 he had decided on a career in art, offering lessons in monochromatic painting and beginning the following year to exhibit and sell. In 1853 he traveled to Düsseldorf to study with a well-known cousin, J.P. Hasenvlever, whose untimely death before Bierstadt arrived caused him to turn instead to Emmanuel Leutze. For three years he worked in and around Düsseldorf, sometimes sharing a studio with his young countryman Worthington Whittredge. With Whittredge in 1856 he traveled south through Switzerland to Italy, where he worked for a year before returning home. Back in the States, Bierstadt concentrated at first on developing his European sketches into finished paintings, but in 1859 an event occurred that transformed his subject matter and career, his first trip west as part of the General Frederick Lander expedition. So struck was he by the grandeur and beauty of the American wilderness that this became his dominant theme for the rest of his life in paintings known both for their panoramic sweep and painstaking detail. Sketches made on the journey westward along the Platte and into the Wind River Mountains became the basis for numerous large paintings that found a ready audience in the East. In 1863 he made another trip west, this time to California and Oregon, accompanied by the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Enjoying a reputation surpassing that of all other landscape painters of his day, Bierstadt built a lavish home in Irvington, New York, and in 1867-69 he sojourned in Europe where he was royally received. California lured him again in 1871, followed by other trips to Canada, Nassau, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, Bierstadt always gathering along the way fresh compositional ideas. In his later years a reaction set in against his work and his reputation declined, although he remained active in New York City until his death in 1902.

Steven A. Nash, Dallas Collects American Paintings: Colonial to Early Modern, September 26- November 14, 1982, (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts), 43.

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