Yosemite Valley at Sunset

1864 · Private collection

landscape

Albert Bierstadt, a native of Germany, stood in the tradition of the Hudson River School, founded by the English-born Thomas Cole, which marked the beginning of a genuinely American landscape painting. He discovered the American wilderness for art, applying these means in the tradition of Claude Lorrain. In 1863, Bierstadt and the writer Fritz Hugh Ludlow set off on an expedition to the Wild West, which took them thousands of miles through the dramatic scenery of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and Oregon.

About the Artist

Albert Bierstadt

1830 – 1902

German-born American painter of the Hudson River school. His parents immigrated to the U.S. when he was an infant. As a young man he traveled and sketched throughout Europe before returning to the U.S. to join a westward-bound expedition in 1859. In a career spanning the entire second half of the 19th century, he emerged as the first technically sophisticated artist to travel to the Far West of America, adapt European and Hudson River School prototypes to a new landscape and produce paintings powerful in their nationalistic and religious symbolism. Specializing in grandiose pictures of vast mountain scenery, he achieved great popularity in his lifetime with panoramic and often fanciful scenes of the American West, including The Rocky Mountains (1863) and Mount Corcoran (c. 1875-77). His huge paintings were actually executed in his New York City studio.

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