Albert Bierstadt

Biography

Albert Bierstadt was born in 1830 in Solingen, Germany and at the age of two his family moved to from Germany to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He returned to Germany in 1853 to study in Dusseldorf and it was here at the Art Academy that he refined his technical abilities by specialising in painting Alpine landscapes.

Bierstadt's extensive travels took him through Germany, Italy and Switzerland and in 1857 he returned to America where he joined an overland survey expedition which allowed him to travel westward across the country. Bierstadt completed various sketches and took numerous photographs of the beautiful mountain ranges and spectacular rock formations that were then to become the studies for the massive canvasses that he would then paint from his studio in New York. Bierstadt quickly became renowned for his paintings of towering and atmospheric mountain ranges and in December 1857 he sold one of his works entitled 'The Portico of Octavia Rome' to Boston Athenaeum, which assured the progress of his career.

Bierstadt became internationally renowned for his rugged and romanticized landscapes of the American West, and these beautiful and enormous paintings found their way into public and private collections at staggeringly high prices for his time. Bierstadt's paintings were on a huge scale with an abundance of detail and dramatic lighting which totally captured the imagination of the art collectors in the 19th Century. His most impressive paintings were of scenes from the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Valley. Bierstadt provided some of the first oil paintings of the Yosemite National Park where he attempted to capture the beauty of at its most majestic.

Bierstadt's paintings were hugely popular and they brought record prices in his lifetime where his popularity and wealth rose to tremendous heights, only to fade later as the advance of impressionism became fashionable to collect.