Birth Year : 1830
Death Year : 1902
Country : Germany
Albert Bierstadt, born near Düsseldorf, Germany, was the leading
painter of what may be thought of as the Rocky Mountain section of the
Hudson River School. He came to the United States in 1832 and spent his
boyhood in Massachusetts. He produced his first oil painting when he was
twenty-one, and two years later went back to Düsseldorf where he remained
for four years, learning to paint in the approved nineteenth-century German
Romantic manner. Bierstadt returned to America in 1857 and spent a summer
in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, sketching and taking photographs
of scenery. In 1858, he joined a government expedition to the Rocky Mountains,
where he made quick sketches in oil, never taking more than fifteen minutes
to portray a scene. His aim was to rework these sketches in his studio
to get the best effects possible from the picturesque and unknown scenery.
Since he was not interested in exactitude, he altered the scenery for dramatic
weight and thus distinguished himself from the meticulously naturalistic
Hudson River artists Thomas Cole, Frederick
Edwin Church, and Asher B. Durand. Bierstadt's works are dramatically lit
and colored almost to a formula: ice-blue water; richly green foregrounds
sharply distinguished from blue and green mountains which fade hazily into
the distance, capped with fluffy clouds that make bright reflections; and
genre elements-animals, Indians, soldiers, settlers-in the immediate foreground.
Both
as original oils and as engravings, Bierstadt's works were very successful,
not only in the United States, but also in Europe, where his works fortified
the conception of the wildness of the young nation. Before long, he could
command prices of up to $35,000 for a large oil canvas, and his works adorned
the castles of Europe and the homes of American millionaires. European
critics praised his work, and he was awarded medals in Austria, Prussia,
Bavaria, Belgium, and France. He chose, however, to remain in the United
States, and he built a huge castle, Malkasten, overlooking the Hudson,
where he lived and worked until his death.
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