BIERSTADT, Albert - b. 1830 Solingen, d. 1902 New York

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.

Yosemite Valley at Sunset

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. The artist captured these impressions in a series of large-format panoramas that made him the founder of the Rocky Mountain School.

Yosemite Valley at Sunset was a preliminary study for one of these large paintings. As dramatic as the area is in reality, Bierstadt heightened it still further, plunging the scene into a veritably mythical illumination. Bierstadt’s views and the stereoscopic photographs his two brothers made of the Yosemite Mountains contributed to the declaration of the area as a national park.