Albert Bierstadt

German-born, raised from the age of two in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and trained in Düsseldorf under the precise, atmospheric landscape painters of the German Romantic school, Bierstadt returned to America in 1857 to find his moment: the exploration of the American West was transforming national politics, and a painter who could make that landscape mythic had an immediate audience. He joined Frederick W. Lander's government survey expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1859 and returned with the material for a series of enormous canvases that made him famous and wealthy. Bierstadt worked large, in the tradition of the German Sublime, and the Rockies and Yosemite Valley gave him material equal to his ambitions. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (1863, now in the Metropolitan Museum) is nearly four meters wide; The Domes of the Yosemite (1867) is larger still. These paintings were exhibited in New York and other cities as theatrical events — specially designed frames, gas lighting, admission charged — and attracted crowds of thousands. The promotional synergy between his images and the early campaigns for Western tourism and conservation was direct: the public appetite his paintings created for wilderness landscapes contributed to the political will that set Yosemite aside in 1864. His reputation collapsed in the 1880s and 1890s as his theatrical grandeur went out of fashion and the more austere realism of European-trained painters arrived. He died in relative obscurity in 1902. The 20th century rediscovered him slowly, and the market for his work recovered dramatically in the last quarter of the century as American collectors reconsidered the Hudson River and Luminist traditions.