Albert Bierstadt was a German-born American painter who put the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite on enormous, glowing canvases. He was born on January 7, 1830, in Solingen, a town in the Prussian Rhineland, grew up in Massachusetts, and died in New York on February 18, 1902.
He showed his paintings one at a time, like plays, to crowds who came for a single picture. In the 1860s he was among the best-paid artists in America, yet he died largely forgotten. People look him up today for the giant landscapes, and to ask whether the West ever looked like that.
The picture that made his name, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, already holds part of the answer: it does not show quite what he saw.
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His story begins far from any mountain. When he was about two, his family crossed the Atlantic to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a cooper, a maker of wooden barrels.
The boy taught himself to draw, and by 1850 he was advertising his services as a drawing instructor. To make a career of it he needed real training, so in 1853 he went back to Germany. He hoped that Johann Peter Hasenclever, a distant relative and a leading figure of the Düsseldorf school, would teach him.
Düsseldorf and the Hudson River School
Hasenclever died that same year, and Bierstadt found American teachers instead: Emanuel Leutze, who had painted Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Worthington Whittredge, a young landscape painter. Beside them he learned to paint rock and tree with patient precision, a skill that would follow him all the way to the Rockies.
What You'll Discover
Which famous painter taught him in Germany.
What he brought back from Wyoming.
How he turned one painting into a show.
Whose name he gave a mountain.
What became of his giant Yosemite.
What Paris refused to hang.