Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was born in Solingen in Prussia, and his family emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, when he was a small child. He returned to Germany in 1853 to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf, and on coming home joined the second generation of landscape painters associated with the Hudson River School, working from a studio in New York. A journey west in 1859 with the government surveyor Frederick W. Lander, and another in 1863 that included seven weeks in Yosemite Valley, supplied the studies for the immense exhibition paintings of the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite that made his name and his fortune. Critics came to find them theatrical, and by his death the taste for epic landscape had passed. Interest revived in the 1960s, and some historians credit his pictures with building support for conservation and for the creation of Yellowstone National Park. Here: Among the Sierra Nevada, California, which he painted in his studio in Rome and exhibited in Berlin and London before shipping it to the United States.