Art of the American West. The Oregon Trail. 1869. A-Z Challenge

                       The Oregon Trail.  Albert Bierstadt.(1830-1902)

Dover Publications, Mineola, New York.  American Art of the West.

Albert Bierstadt was a German born landscape artist, one of the Hudson River school of painters.  These painters glorified nature and his picturesque scenes of the natural wonders of the West captured the beauty of the American wilderness.

He was born in Solingen, Germany.  When he was two years old, his family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1853 he returned to Germany to study in Dusseldorf, where he practiced his art by painting Alpine landscapes. When he returned to America in 1857, he joined an overland survey company on their trip West.  Along the route, he sketched rock formations, mountain ranges,  took photographs, which became the huge paintings, with painstaking detail and dramatic lighting, which he painted in his New York studio.  

In 1867, he married and he and his new bride went to London.  When his wife needed a warmer climate, they moved to Nassau, the Bahamas, where he found new subjects for his painting, the tropics.

He died suddenly in 1902 and his popularity died with him until the 1960's when there was more interest in preserving American national landmarks, and his paintings began to be shown again.

He was a prolific artist, painting possibly as many as 4000 works, most have survived and are in many museums in the United States.


We have a mountain in Colorado that was named in his honor, Mount Bierstadt. Mount Bierstadt is one of our "fourteeners", 14, 065 feet tall, climbable for beginners.
http://www.albertbierstadt.org/biography.html

Mount Bierstadt   www.summitpost.org