• About the Work of Art

• Activities for Sunrise, Yosemite Valley
   

Albert Bierstadt was one of the most popular American landscape painters during the 1860s and early 1870s. The German-born artist made five trips west during a thirty-year period. His extensive sketches from these trips inspired grand canvases depicting the awesome beauty of the American West. His paintings introduced the public to the sublime majesty of the Rocky Mountains, and he received critical praise in the United States and Europe.

Born in Solingen, Germany, Bierstadt came to the United States with his family in 1832 and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He began his artistic career at age twenty by advertising that he was prepared to teach drawing to all comers. Within a few years, he had exhibited paintings locally and had attracted enough support to finance a return to Germany for further study.

At twenty-three he returned to Düsseldorf to study art, though he never actually enrolled in art classes. Bierstadt was associated with Worthington Whittredge, ten years his senior, while studying in Düsseldorf. (See Worthington Whittredge, On the Cache La Poudre River, Colorado, 1876, also featured in this teaching guide.) Early in his career, both before and after his stay in Germany, Bierstadt painted the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a favorite area for artists such as Thomas Cole. Like Cole, Bierstadt incorporated elements from numerous drawings into a single picture, making a composite of the various views he had sketched on location.

In 1858 Bierstadt joined Frederick West Lander’s transcontinental surveying expedition through the Rocky Mountains. During the trip he made sketches that he later transformed into panoramic paintings. For Americans who had never seen the Rocky Mountains and the West, Bierstadt’s paintings were magical. Some of his canvases were so large and detailed that viewers stood a distance from the painting and used opera glasses to focus on small sections. Bierstadt became the first artist to capture the monumentality of the western wilderness, and his paintings gave many Americans their first chance to see the West.

By bringing the magnificence of the West to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness, Bierstadt influenced the establishment of California’s Yosemite National Park. The beauty of his landscapes made people realize the importance of protecting the wilderness and provided a place to escape from the forces of the Industrial Revolution.

Bierstadt was best known for his scenes of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, beginning with Yosemite in 1863. In fact, his paintings were an enormous financial success and sold for unparalleled prices. In 1865 the sale of his early masterwork The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak to the English railroad entrepreneur James McHenry for $25,000 caused a sensation and marked a milestone in Bierstadt’s career.

Bierstadt’s popularity waned as the transcontinental railroad opened the frontier to travelers and tastes turned to intimate views of daily life by European artists. By 1869, people could travel with relative ease and comfort and see the sights for themselves. Consequently, the function of the artist-explorer began to diminish.

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