Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt – Self-taught in the USA; studies at the Düsseldorf Academy

Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen in Germany on 7 January 1830. He was just two years old when he emigrated with his parents and two brothers to the USA where the family wished to start a new life in the harbour town of New Bedford in the state of Massachusetts and where his father had found work as a cellar master in the prospering centre of the American whaling industry. Albert Bierstadt was a self-taught painter and he hired himself out as a drawing teacher, and also worked with photography and its precursor, the daguerreotype. While his brother Edward actually pursued a career as a photographer, Albert returned to his family’s old home in Germany where he wished to take lessons from the important painter Johann Peter Hasenclever, a cousin of his mother. Unfortunately, Hasenclever died soon after the arrival of the young American and could no longer guide his relative’s education, so Hasenclever’s painter friends arranged for Bierstadt to study at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.

Study trip through Europe; artistic breakthrough in New York

In Düsseldorf, Albert Bierstadt learnt landscape painting from, among others, Andreas Achenbach and Carl Friedrich Lessing. He also found a kindred spirit in the history painter Emanuel Leutze who, like Bierstadt – six years his elder – had grown up in the USA and was now searching for his family’s roots in Germany. With other American painter friends such as Sanford Robinson Gifford and Worthington Whittredge, Leutze and Bierstadt travelled throughout Germany and also visited Switzerland and Italy. Bierstadt produced numerous sketches on these trips which he would later use as models for his monumental oil paintings. He returned to the USA as a mature artist in the summer of 1857 with many valuable experiences in tow and, after a few art exhibitions in the vicinity of his hometown, moved to New York where he took part in the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, with his large-scale panoramic view of Lake Lucerne in front of the Swiss Apls winning great acclaim. 

Triumphant rise to the artistic Olympus; sharp fall into poverty

Albert Bierstadt did not just depict, but transfigured, embellished his landscape paintings - always of large format – with all kinds of Romantic details, always in search of the most idealised representation possible, unencumbered by the actual conditions. With this style, he rose to become the most famous and well-paid painter in America, with his extraordinarily high productivity contributing to this. A visit to London became a triumphal procession and his paintings were even presented to Queen Victoria. Despite these successes, the artist had to struggle with numerous difficulties and strokes of fate in the last years of his life. He was greatly affected by the death of his wife Rosalie, and the precarious economic situation forced him to declare bankruptcy. His naively idealised style of painting was no longer in tune with the changing tastes of the time. 

Albert Bierstadt died in New York City on 18 February 1902. Prompted by the environmental movement of the 1960s, his paintings have once again found their way into many American living rooms in the form of reproductions, and the international art market pays handsome prices for originals by Albert Bierstadt.