Bierstadt was an American artist who was born in Germany. He became famous for painting landscapes of the American West. He made oil sketches of the scenery during his visits to the Yosemite Valley. He later used the sketches as a reference for his paintings. His landscape paintings promoted the preservation of Yosemite as public parkland. His work also raised awareness of the need to protect the land and America’s natural beauty.
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.
