Albert Bierstadt

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In 1858, Bierstadt exhibited a large painting of a Swiss landscape at the National Academy of Design, which gained him positive critical reception and honorary membership in the Academy. Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River valley. He was part of a group of artists known as the Hudson River School.

In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those western American landscapes for his work. He returned to a studio he had taken at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York with sketches for numerous paintings he then finished. In 1860, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany.

In 1863, Bierstadt traveled West again, this time in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he later married. The pair spent seven weeks in the Yosemite Valley. Throughout the 1860s, Bierstadt used studies from this trip as the source for large-scale paintings for exhibition and he continued to visit the American West throughout his career. The immense canvases he produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the western American landscape. Bierstadt's technical proficiency, earned through his study of European landscape, was crucial to his success as a painter of the American West and accounted for his popularity in disseminating views of the Rocky Mountains to those who had not seen them.

During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), Bierstadt was drafted in 1863 and paid for a substitute to serve in his place. By 1862, he had completed one Civil War painting Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War based on his brief experiences with soldiers stationed at Camp Cameron in 1861. That painting was based on a stereoscopic photograph taken by his brother Edward Bierstadt, who operated a photography studio at Langley's Tavern in Virginia. The painting received a positive review when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 1861. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey observed that the painting, created from photographs, "is quintessentially that of a voyeur, privy to the stories and unblemished by the violence and brutality of first-hand combat experience."

Financial recognition confirmed his status: The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, completed in 1863, was purchased for $25,000 in 1865, the equivalent of almost $400,000 in 2020.

In 1867, Bierstadt returned to Europe, arriving in London where he exhibited two landscape paintings in a private reception with Queen Victoria. He then travelled through Europe for the next two years, painting new works while also cultivating social and business contacts to sustain the market for his art on the continent. For example, he painted Among the Sierra Nevada, California in his Rome studio, displaying it in Berlin and London before having it shipped to the U.S. His exhibition pieces both impressed European audiences and furthered the idea of the American West as a land of promise during a period when European emigration to the U.S. was increasing. Bierstadt's choice of grandiose subjects was matched by his entrepreneurial flair. His exhibitions of individual works were accompanied by promotion, ticket sales, and, in the words of one critic, a "vast machinery of advertisement and puffery."

Bierstadt's popularity in the U.S. remained strong during his European tour. The publicity generated by his Yosemite Valley paintings in 1868 led a number of explorers to request his presence as part of their westward expeditions. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad also commissioned him to visit and paint the Grand Canyon and surrounding region.

Despite his popular success, Bierstadt was criticized by some contemporaries for the romanticism evident in his choice of subjects and for his use of light, which they found excessive. Some critics objected to Bierstadt's paintings of Native Americans based on their belief that including Indigenous Americans "marred" the "impression of solitary grandeur."

His wife, Rosalie, was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1876, and Bierstadt spent increasing amounts of time with her in the warmer climate of Nassau in the Bahamas until her death in 1893. He also maintained travel between the western United States, Canada, and his studio in New York.

Though his painting career continued later into his life, Bierstadt's work fell increasingly out of critical favor and was increasingly attacked for its theatrical tone. In 1882, a fire destroyed Bierstadt's studio at Irvington, New York and, with it, many of his paintings.

Bierstadt was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 paintings during his lifetime. Yet by the time of his death on February 18, 1902, the taste for epic landscape painting had long since subsided. Bierstadt was buried at the Rural Cemetery in New Bedford, Massachusetts and remained largely forgotten for nearly 60 years.

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