Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 14

Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902
"Mt. Rosalie, Colorado" Albert Bierstadt, Western American Mountain Landscape

circa 1863

$85,000
£64,897.12
€74,988.04
CA$119,323.91
A$132,998.93
CHF 69,779.97
MX$1,624,133.76
NOK 883,566.20
SEK 835,104.46
DKK 559,668.44

About the Item

Albert Bierstadt Mt. Rosalie, Colorado, circa 1863 Signed lower left: ABierstadt; inscribed on verso: Mt. Rosalie / Colorado Oil on paper 13 1/4 x 9 1/2 inches Provenance Private Collection, New York This work is included in the database for the Albert Bierstadt Catalogue Raisonné Project and is accompanied by a letter of opinion from Melissa Webster Speidel, President of the Bierstadt Foundation and Director of the Albert Bierstadt Catalogue Raisonné Project. 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 Nevadas that lured many people to visit those sites. He was also one of the first artists to use a camera to record landscape views. His oil paintings, many of them huge, were the ultimate expression of the popular 19th-century Romanticism. But his reputation diminished when public taste in art changed dramatically and replaced Realism and Romanticism with Impressionism and when transcontinental railway travel revealed that the West looked nothing like his idealized paintings. Bierstadt was born in Solingen, near Dusseldorf, Germany, and sailed as a baby with his family who settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Unlike many of his successful peers, as a child, he showed only casual interest in and talent for art, and he had little encouragement from his family. In New Bedford, he acquired a few collectors of his early work including a Mrs. Hathaway from a local shipping family. At a New Bedford Concert Hall, he also used the floral images of George Harvey (1800-1878) for a scenery picture shows with a Drummond Light, a lantern that allowed one picture to fade into another. In 1853, he returned to Dusseldorf where he studied at the Royal Academy with landscape painters Andreas Aschenbach and Karl Friedman Lessing. Some of his fellow students were Emmanuel Leutze, Sanford Gifford and Worthington Whittredge, and they all learned much attention to detail, respect for composition and skilled drawing. During this period, he traveled extensively in Europe, especially Italy, and companions were Whittredge and Gifford. He completed many picturesque Old World scenes in the style that later became his trademark. In 1857, he returned to the United States and painted the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and in 1858, exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Design in New York. His fourteen entries included, Lake Lucerne, which was one of the biggest in the exhibition. That same year, representatives of the Boston Atheneum, purchased his painting, The Portico of Octavia, Rome, for $400.00 and this was the first museum purchase acquisition of his work. In January 1859, he heard a lecture in New Bedford on the American West by Bayard Taylor, famous traveler and lecturer, and this exposure stirred an interest that played a large part in his future career. Meanwhile, he had settled into New York City where he lived and occupied a studio in the Tenth Street Building, which had 25 studio spaces and became well known for its prestigious occupants. He remained in this studio space until 1881, when he moved to 1271 Broadway to the Rensselaier Building. A year later he found the subject matter that set the course of his career. He joined a western military expedition led by Colonel Frederick W. Lander to survey wagon routes in the Rocky Mountains and Wyoming. From sketches and artifacts such as buffalo hides and Indian items, he painted studio western scenes including landscapes, Indians, and wildlife in the traditional style he had learned in Europe. His first big western painting, 1860, had several titles: The Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak and/or The Rocky Mountains. (It should not be confused with the 1863 painting, The Rocky Mountains, now in the Metropolitan Museum.) The 1860 painting did not generated much reaction when it was exhibited at the National Academy nor did it find a buyer, but it did establish "its creator, however, as the artistic spokesman of the American Far West" . . . (Hendricks 94) Subsequently the painting was lost, having been loaned to a Buffalo New York high school in 1922. In 1861, Bierstadt and his friend from Dusseldorf, Emanuel Leutze, got permission to visit army camps around Washington to paint Civil War scenes, and from this experience plus an 1863 visit to Fort Sumter, Bierstadt painted war theme canvases including The Bombardment of Fort Sumter. During this period, he also visited the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and made plans for a second visit to the American West, which involved securing welcomes at U.S. army forts by getting travel permission from Charles Sumner, Secretary of War. This second trip West was with his friend, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife Rosalie Osborne, Bierstadt would subsequently marry in circumstances that 'titilated' New York society. Ludlow was the son of a Presbyterian absolutist minister of Poughkeepsie, New York, and was a writer of a controversial but best-selling book, The Hasheesh Eater. The publication was praising of hashish and described his positive experiences of being one of the first westerners to use the drug, which had been used in India and other countries for over a thousand years but was first introduced in 1839 in America. As a result of notoriety for the book, by the mid 1850s, he was highly prominent in New York society. He was married to Rosalie Osborne of wealthy family of Waterville, New York, It has been suggested that Rosalie and Bierstadt were showing interest in each other at the time of the 1863 western trip of the two men.
  • Creator:
    Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902 (1830-1902, American)
  • Creation Year:
    circa 1863
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 20 in (50.8 cm)Width: 15 in (38.1 cm)
  • More Editions & Sizes:
    Unique workPrice: $85,000
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1841216216502

More From This Seller

View All
"Wasatch Range, Utah" James Taylor Harwood, Western Landscape, Mormon LDS
By James Taylor Harwood
Located in New York, NY
James Taylor Harwood Wasatch Range, Utah Inscribed "Wasatch Range, Utah" on the stretcher Oil on canvas 16 x 31 inches Provenance Blanche M. Swan Private Collection James Taylor Ha...
Category

1910s American Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Mount Rockwell, Glacier National Park, Montana, " Mountain Lake Landscape View
By Charles Warren Eaton
Located in New York, NY
Charles Warren Eaton (1857 – 1937) The Shadow of Mount Rockwell, Glacier National Park, Montana, 1921 Oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches Signed lower right: CHAS WARREN EATON. Provenance: The artist The Macbeth Gallery, New York Private Collection Sotheby's New York, American Art, April 14, 1989 ConocoPhillips, Houston Simpson Galleries, Houston, Fine Art & Antiques, May 18, 2019, Lot 447 Exhibited: New York, The Macbeth Gallery, Paintings of Glacier National Park by Charles Warren Eaton, December 13, 1921 - January 2, 1922, no. 2. Literature: "Two Exhibitions at Macbeth's," American Art News, New York, Vol. XX, No. 10, December 17, 1921. A contemporary critic wrote that the paintings of Charles Warren Eaton appeal to “the dreamers who find in them the undiscovered scenes in which their fancy long has dwelt.” Eaton’s contemplative landscapes exude a spiritual quality that moves the observer into a similar frame of mind. He loved to depict the ethereal light of dawn and dusk in late autumn or winter, usually without any reference to human or animal figures or buildings. These Tonalist paintings, with their subdued palette and relatively intimate scale, marked a definite break with the fading popularity of the panoramic and romantic views of the Hudson River School painters. Charles Warren Eaton was born in Albany, New York to a family of limited means. He began painting while working in a dry-goods store. At age 22, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design in New York City and then studied figure painting at the Art Students League. By 1886, he was successful enough to quit his day job and make a living as a landscape painter. That year, he traveled to Europe with fellow Tonalist painters Leonard Ochtman and Ben Foster. In France, Eaton visited popular artist’s spots such as Paris, Fontainebleau and Grez-sur-Loing, and fell in love with the loose brushwork and moody style of French Barbizon painting. Returning to the United States, Eaton fell under the spell of George Inness, the foremost exponent of Barbizon style in the United States. In 1888, Eaton settled near Inness in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where Eaton lived until his death in 1937. In this period, he painted shadowy and ambiguous landscapes inspired by rural scenery in the northeastern United States. His signature theme was a cropped view of the branches, trunks, and foliage of a pine grove silhouetted against a delicately illuminated sunset or moonlit sky. He painted this vision so often between 1900 and 1910 that he picked up the sobriquet ‘‘The Pine Tree Painter.” After 1910, Eaton responded to the popularity of Impressionism by using brighter colors and painting sunlit daytime scenes. In 1921, he was hired to paint Glacier Lake, in Glacier National Park by the Great Northern Railroad Company as part of their ‘See America First’ campaign. He produced more than 20 paintings, among the artist's last works, that now poignantly remind viewers of the vast disappearing glaciers. Eaton tended to approach this mountain scenery from an oblique vantage point; he liked to capture small episodes, showing mountaintops nearly obscured by dramatically attenuated screens of fir trees. Eaton, like many Tonalist artists of his generation such as Henry Ward Ranger, John Francis Murphy, and Charles Melville Dewey...
Category

1920s Tonalist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Paint, Oil

"Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley" George Henry Smillie, West, 19th Century
By George Henry Smillie
Located in New York, NY
George Henry Smillie Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, 1871 Signed and inscribed board verso "Cathedral Rocks-Morning-Yo-semite Valley Aug. 71 Geo. H. Smillie", also inscribed "Yo-se...
Category

1870s Academic Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil, Board

"Western Lake Landscape, " John Fery, Hudson River School View
By John Fery
Located in New York, NY
John Fery (1859 - 1934) Western Lake Landscape, circa 1920 Oil on canvas 21 x 23 1/4 inches Signed lower left Provenance: Private Collection, New York Born in Austria, John Fery earned a strong reputation for dramatic paintings of western mountain landscape in the United States. Glacier National Park in northwest Montana was a popular subject for him. He was raised in a prominent, wealthy family that lived on an estate about nineteen miles northeast of Salzburg. His mother was Hungarian, and his father was born in Bohemia. S ome sources have written that he studied art in Dusseldorf, Germany with Peter Jansen, and also in Munich, Venice and Karlsruhe. But his "name does not appear in the records of the major art schools in any of these places, nor is there any record of his name at either the Vienna or Budapest academies." (Merrill 26) It is possible, however, that he received private instruction, and because of the sophistication of his painting, sources think it unlikely that he was self taught. An early interest in wilderness scenery led him to painting American landscapes and hunting scenes. In the mid 1880s, he came to America and lived in the German community in Milwaukee, and then in 1886, brought his family to the United States. His wife, Mary Rose Kraemer (1862-1940), was born in Switzerland, and they had one child born near Munich and two others born in the United States. From 1886 to 1888, they lived in New York, and by 1890, Fery had made his first trip West. He visited Yellowstone Park in 1891, and indicated in his writings that he had been there even earlier. From 1892 to 1893, he led European nobility on hunting expeditions to the American Northwest, made possible by the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad...
Category

1920s Hudson River School Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Grand Manan" Harrison Bird Brown, Maine Landscape, Hudson River School Seascape
By Harrison Bird Brown
Located in New York, NY
Harrison Bird Brown (1831 - 1915) Grand Manan Oil on canvas 12 x 20 inches Signed with initials lower left Harrison Bird Brown was born in 1831 in Portland, Maine, and is best known for his White Mountain landscapes and marine paintings of Maine's Casco Bay...
Category

Late 19th Century Hudson River School Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

"Clay Bluffs on No Man’s Land" Sanford Gifford, 19th Century Luminist Landscape
By Sanford Robinson Gifford
Located in New York, NY
Sanford Robinson Gifford A Sketch of Clay Bluffs on No Man’s Land, South of Martha's Vineyard, 1877 Stamp on verso of canvas: S. R. Gifford [estate] Sale Typed label on upper stretch...
Category

1870s Hudson River School Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

You May Also Like

"In the Canadian Rockies" 19th Century Oil Painting on Canvas
By Albert Bierstadt, 1830-1902
Located in Jacksonville, FL
The art is signed AB..6. lower right corner Albert Bierstadt, a luminary of 19th-century American landscape painting, was born on January 7, 1830, in Solingen, Prussia (now Germany)...
Category

19th Century Academic Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil

Late 19th Century Tonalist Rocky Mountain High Camp Landscape
Located in Soquel, CA
Late 19th Century Tonalist Rocky Mountain High Camp Landscape Wonderful 19th Century tonalist painting of Flat Top Mountain in the Rocky Mountains by unknown artist (American, late ...
Category

Early 1900s Tonalist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Terra Tomah Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado Landscape Painting
Located in Denver, CO
This captivating oil painting on linen by Denver-based artist Raymond Knaub (born 1940) is titled "Terra Tomah Mountain – Rocky Mountain National Park, C...
Category

20th Century American Realist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil

Oil Landscape of West on Snake River
By Cyrenius Hall
Located in Fredericksburg, VA
Cyrenius Hall was an artist who painted Western landscapes in a luminous style. He first went to Portland, Oregon in 1853 and 1854 over the Oregon Trail. From there he executed views...
Category

Early 19th Century Hudson River School Landscape Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Mountain Landscape - Oil on Canvas by G. Giani - 1911
By Giovanni Giani
Located in Roma, IT
Original Oil on Canvas by Giovanni Giani, realized by the artist in 1911. Signed and date lower left "G. Giani 1911". Very good conditions.
Category

1910s Naturalistic Figurative Paintings

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Early 20th Century Serene Mountaintops Landscape
Located in Soquel, CA
Sweeping early 20th century landscape painting of mountains reflected over a California lake by an unknown artist. Circa 1915. Unframed. Image size: 20"L x 16"H.
Category

1910s American Impressionist Landscape Paintings

Materials

Oil, Fiberboard