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ALBERT BIERSTADT

1830 - 1902

Biographythe famed landscape painter, was born in Solingen, Germany; brought up in America; studied in Dusseldorf, Germany; sketched in the West; painted scenes of the West in a Dusseldorf-Hudson River School manner in New York State; was internationally renowned for his Rocky Mountain paintings; lived in a mansion on the Hudson; and died in New York City flat broke. He also resided in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Tappan Zee, New York. His work is found in numerous museums and private collections, including Utah Museum of Fine Arts and Brigham Young University. He went west first in 1859 on a government expedition and spent time sketching in Wind River and Shoshone country that summer. He then returned to New York and painted his first Rocky Mountain picture for the National Academy of Design exhibition of 1860. He was thirty, and in the next three years, he won immediate and sensational popularity. Another western trip in 1863 found the artist working in Nebraska, Colorado, Oregon, California, and Utah. He was also in Salt Lake City on that trip. In fact, John Tullidge (q.v.), George Beard (q.v.), Alfred Lambourne (q.v.), and especially H.L.A. Culmer (q.v.) may be noted as particularly involved within a romantic landscape context in which Bierstadt was supreme. (b. January 7; d. February 18)

Olpin, Robert S., William C. Seifrit, and Vern G. Swanson. ARTISTS OF UTAH. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999: 22.

Albert Bierstadt's love of nature began during his early studies and travels in Europe, 1853-1857. After returning to America, he learned of the expeditions West and desired to experience the untamed wilderness for himself. While exploring the West, he began to discover that the American landscape had its own unique qualities: "The mountains are very fine... they resemble very much the Bernese Alps. [The western] mountains present a scene which every lover of landscape would gaze upon in unqualified delight... but, when we look up and measure the mighty perpendicular cliffs that rise hundreds of feet aloft, all capped with snow, we realize that we are among a different class of mountains."

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