Bierstadt's American West
Albert Bierstadt went west with a government survey party in 1859 and spent the next thirty years painting the Rocky Mountains, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada for audiences back east.
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About the series
He was born in Germany, grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and trained in Düsseldorf, where he learned to paint large, highly finished landscapes. In 1859 he joined Frederick Lander's survey expedition along the Oregon Trail, sketching and taking photographs in the Wind River Mountains. In 1863 he travelled to Yosemite and on to Oregon. Back in his New York studio he turned the sketches into huge canvases of peaks, waterfalls and glowing evening light.
His big paintings were shown like events, and people paid to see them. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, from 1863, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Domes of the Yosemite, from 1867, about three metres high and nearly five wide, hangs in the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont. The Last of the Buffalo, from 1888, painted as the herds were all but gone, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
These are big views that need room. A wide Yosemite or Sierra scene can fill a living room wall, and the smaller lake and river studies suit a study or hallway.
