Albert Bierstadt: Composite Rockies, Gaslit Shows and a $25,000 Canvas

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830 and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1853 he returned to Germany to study at the Düsseldorf School, which taught dramatic lighting, dark underpainting and stage-like composition. His older brothers Edward and Charles were photographers specializing in stereoscopic views, which shaped his sense of foreground, middle ground and depth. In 1859 he joined Frederick W. Lander's government survey expedition west, and in 1863 he traveled to Yosemite Valley with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. He gathered sketches and notes in the field, then combined elements from different places into composite scenes in his studio at New York's Tenth Street Studio Building and later in Rome. In 1865 he sold The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak for $25,000, roughly $400,000 today.

Bierstadt exhibited single paintings in rented halls draped in dark fabric, lit by directed gaslight and roped off, with viewing tubes and paid admission, and he toured Europe and showed his work privately to Queen Victoria. Drafted in 1863, he paid a substitute. Critics came to call his light gaudy and his promotion puffery, and by the late 19th century taste had turned to the Barbizon School and Impressionism. In 1882 fire destroyed his Irvington, New York, mansion and studio, Malkasten, with many paintings, sketches and his collection of Native artifacts. His wife Rosalie, formerly married to Ludlow, contracted tuberculosis in 1876 and died in 1893. He died bankrupt in 1902, and his reputation revived in the 1960s.

• His painting Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War was based largely on a stereoscopic photograph by his brother Edward.
• Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey described that painting as the perspective of a voyeur.
• Some critics complained that including Native Americans spoiled the solitary grandeur of his scenes.
• His paintings helped build public and political support for creating Yellowstone National Park.
• Mount Bierstadt and Bierstadt Lake in Colorado are named for him.