Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lush, sweeping landscapes of the American West. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. He is best known for his spectacular landscapes of the unsettled west.
He is considered one of the greatest American romantic landscape painters and he lived in a time where the relationship between man and nature was being explored in art, philosophy, and writing. The paralleled the exploration of the natural world as Americans explored the western frontier and discovered the enormous natural beauty of their country and they saw themselves as living in a bucolic ideal and, paradoxically, also claimed as their right the conquest of the wide open spaces.
Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany and his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He developed a taste for art and made clever crayon sketches in his youth and in 1851, he began to paint in oils and studied painting with the members of the Düsseldorf School from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting.
There are nearly 950 paintings displayed on these walls, Albert Bierstadt gallery is not intended to be a complete nor definitive collection of his works, and some images here may only have been attributed to Bierstadt elsewhere. The storage room houses additional black and white scans.
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