Albert Bierstadt 1830-1902

Albert Bierstadt originally wanted to paint people. It was his decision to leave his home in New Bedford, Massachusetts and seek more training that led him to embrace landscape painting. He was virtually self-taught, yet when he began to emerge as a talented artist, Bierstadt decided he had more learning to do and returned to his country of birth, Germany, to study at the Dusseldorf Academy. He intended to train with a renowned genre painter, Johann Peter Hasclever, yet Hasclever had passed away just as Bierstadt arrived; thus he found himself in the hands of artists who were focused on the new popular subject of landscape. He quickly saw that his own talent lay in landscape, not in figure painting. He came to share a studio with Worthington Whittredge with whom he went on sketching excursions, along with other American artists such as Sanford Robinson Gifford and Emanuel Leutze. He was undoubtedly influenced by the masterful techniques of these other painters and returned to the United States with tremendous knowledge and skill, and continued to paint European themes in the Dusseldorf style.

Bierstadt first conquered the American west in 1859 when he joined an excursion led by Colonel F.W. Lander. Not only was Lander the “government’s most famous surveyor of the Overland Trail but he was also a published poet and an art critic. He solicited painters and photographers to accompany and record his surveys, as long as the artists paid their own expenses.” It was a perfect opportunity for the young Bierstadt to see the uncharted territory of the frontier that so intrigued him and ultimately helped to cultivate his unique style.