BIERSTADT, Albert (Solingen, 1830 – New York, 1902)
Bierstadt, one of the members of the Hudson River School, was from a family of German emigrants who had arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when the artist was two years old. In 1853 he returned to Europe where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and travelled through Germany, Switzerland and Italy in the company of another American artist, Worthington Whittredge. On his return to America, Bierstadt exhibited two works at the National Academy of Design which he had painted in Europe, showing himself to be a fully mature artist.
In 1859 he made his first trip West. He joined a state expedition which was to explore a new route to the Pacific under the command of Captain Frederick W. Lander. They travelled to west of Wyoming and Bierstadt made numerous sketches of the Rocky Mountains and also took stereoscopic photographs of the American Indians. In 1859 he opened a studio in New York where he showed his first paintings of the American West. These enormous canvases, which evoked the epic and spiritual power of the Rocky Mountains, confirmed his reputation as the most important painter of the American West. In 1863 he set out on his second trip to the far West in the company of the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who would later write an account of this adventure entitled The Heart of the Continent. Bierstadt visited San Francisco, the Yosemite Valley and Oregon, making sketches out of doors which would be used in the creation of his most spectacular finished canvases.
In 1865 the artist bought a plot of land in Irvington, New York; on the banks of the Hudson River. He built a large house which he named “Malkaste” after a club in Düsseldorf which he frequented when young.
In 1867 Bierstadt and his wife Rosalie Osborne spent two years in Europe. On their return they travelled to San Francisco in the recently built railway, and from there the artist continued to explore the remote regions of the West. He returned to the Yosemite Valley, also visiting Yellowstone Park in 1881, as well as the Tropics and Alaska and the Canadian Rocky Mountains in 1889.
The end of his career saw his painting fall out of favour. American taste had changed and was now focused on Impressionism, and Bierstadt’s work was considered excessively theatrical and old fashioned. He died a completely forgotten name.
Paloma Alarcó
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