Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902

Mount Pilatus above Lake Lucerne

Albert Bierstadt was born on January 7, 1830, in Solingen. He was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. Likely the most famous and financially successful late 19th-century painter of the American western landscape, Albert Bierstadt created grandiose, dramatic scenes of the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada that lured many people to visit those sites. He was also one of the first artists to use a camera to record landscape views. Albert Bierstadt was active in New York, California, Kansas, Massachusetts and Germany. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. In the summer of 1856, during four years of study in Europe, Bierstadt joined several American colleagues on a sketching trip. His fascination with the Swiss terrain resulted in a series of oil studies and pencil sketches, executed during the trip and several paintings of the mountain landscape, painted upon his return to New Bedford, Massachusetts. Bierstadt died on February 18, 1902, in New York.