Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

Albert Bierstadt was like most painters of the Rocky Mountains in the nineteenth century, he was foreign born. He was born in 1830 in Soligen, near Dusseldorf, Germany and died in New York in 1902.

He and his family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old. He grew up in Bedford, Mass. In 1853, Bierstadt returned to Dusseldorf to study under the landscape painters Andreas Aschenbach and Karl F. Lessing. Under the influence of the Dusseldorf school, and in the company of his fellow painters Emmanuel Leutze and Thomas Worthington Whittridge, Bierstadt learned attention to detail, the respect for drawing and the numerous tricks and effects of technique which he utilized for the rest of his life.

He traveled though Germany, Switzerland and Italy during his four years of European study, and produced some competent and pleasing picturesque old world scenes. After his return to the United States in 1857, did he travel and paint in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

He also began to employ a camera, not used by artist of the time. It was not until 1858 that he discovered the subject matter which he would make his own. In that year, Bierstadt joined a survey expedition to the American West led by Col. F. W. Lander. He made numerous studies, working swiftly, of the spectacular Western scenery, Indians and wildlife. He patiently set to work in his studio to produce paintings of the West which filled a seemly insatiable hunger of the American and European public.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Brooklyn Museums, New York
Capital Building, Washington, D.C.
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
High Museum, Atlanta, GA.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Fine Art, Boston
St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, VT.
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
Amon Carter, Fort Worth, Texas
Gilcrease, Tulsa