Photograph of Albert Bierstadt, undated.
The blog header seen above is a painting by Albert Bierstadt titled “Oregon Trail-Night Camp on Green River at Lander Cut-Off, Wyoming.” The painting was completed around 1875. Bierstadt was a prominent American artist during the nineteenth century, best known for his landscape paintings of the American West.
Bierstadt was born in Germany in 1830 and moved to the United States at the age of 2. His family settled in Massachusetts, and little is known about his childhood and adolescence. However, sometime around 1850 when Bierstadt was in his twenties, he became known locally as an art instructor. Hoping to further develop his skills, he traveled to Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1853 to study with well-known artists such as Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, and Carl Wimar. After returning to the States in 1857, he participated in several expeditions exploring the American West, even settling for a time in California. His powerful western landscapes capture the beauty of the North American continent and range from sunset scenes over the Rocky Mountains, to paintings of California beaches, Yosemite, Mt. Saint Helens (in modern-day Washington State), and Indian encampments along the overland trails. A prolific artist, Bierstadt also painted this landscape of an Indian village on the Wolf River in Kansas, completed in around 1859.
Bierstadt gained international fame for his stunning masterpieces and today is recognized as a major contributor to the Hudson River School, which flourished from about 1835 until 1870. According to the online Artcylopedia, the artists affiliated with this school embraced romantic images of the American frontier, and “the particular use of light effects, to lend an exaggerated drama to such elements as mist and sunsets, developed into a subspecialty known as Luminism.”[1] Although this style fell out of favor in the late nineteenth century, Bierstadt will forever be synonymous with artistic representations of the American wilderness.
[1] “Artists by Movement: The Hudson River School,” Artcyclopedia, http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/hudson-river-school.html, accessed July 18, 2008.
