Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany in 1830 and came to America with his parents two years later. he began his studies as a landscape painter during the late 1840s and in 1853 he traveled to Dusseldorf, where he mastered the practice of making concise sketches directly from lanature. He returned to America in 1857. Two years later he embarked on the first of his journeys through the American West, which became the focus of his art. The works which Bierstadt produced from this trip–and from later travels in 1863 and 1871-173 to the Rocky Mountains, Yosemite, and California–established him as the preeminent landscape painter of western America.
Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Bierstadt was born in Prussia, but his family moved to the United States when he was one year old. He returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. Bierstadt was an important interpreter of the western landscape, and he is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.
