Albert Bierstadt was the preeminent painter of the nineteenth-century American West, whose monumental canvases shaped the visual mythology of the frontier and helped establish American landscape painting as a subject of serious international attention
Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 1902) was a German-born American painter and a leading figure of the second generation of the Hudson River School. Born near Düsseldorf, Westphalia, he emigrated with his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1831. He returned to Germany in 1853 to train among the painters of the informal Düsseldorf school before resettling in the United States in 1857 and committing himself fully to landscape painting. His career was transformed by his 1859 westward expedition with the U.S. government surveyor Frederick W. Lander, which gave him direct experience of the Rocky Mountains and the wider American interior.
The immense, romantically lit canvases he produced in the years that followed established him as the foremost interpreter of the western American landscape. He exhibited widely across Europe during his lifetime, was awarded a gold medal at the Royal Academy, and received a private audience with Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales in 1868.