On this day in 1830, the artist whose paintings are credited with inspiring Congress to create the world’s first national park, was born in Solingen, Germany.
Albert Bierstadt’s sweeping depictions of the West represented dramatic new vistas for American public.
Raised in New England, Bierstadt (above) was considered a member of the American Hudson River School, despite his European birthplace. The mid-19th century art movement included numerous painters of romanticized landscapes mostly centering on the northern Atlantic Coast.
The U.S. government wasn’t interested in scenery in 1859, however, when surveyor Frederick Landers (left) was commissioned to find a route for a trans-continental railroad. Fortunately, he took Bierstadt with him, as well as painter Henry Hitchings and photographer Francis Seth Frost. It turned out to be a brilliant marketing strategy. The stunning images the trio brought back inspired popular support for a path to the Pacific.
Returning to his studio in New York with countless sketches, Bierstadt 
completed dozens of large, romantic landscapes that became increasingly popular with collectors.
He returned to the West in 1863, this time with author Fitz Hugh Ludlow (right) and Ludlow’s wife, Rosalie. The writer’s colorful essays published in newspapers during their journey and Ludlow’s book, “The Heart of the Continent” burnished Bierstadt’s reputation as a painter and greatly improved his bank account.
The trip, however, didn’t end well for Ludlow. Author of the autobiographical “The Hasheesh Eater,” he was in fact, hopelessly addicted to opium. Rosalie (left) divorced him in 1867 and married Bierstadt a few short months later.
By then, Bierstadt was established as the premier Western painter. His enormous landscapes of infinite prairies and luminous mountains commanded huge sums.
“Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak,” (above) measuring 10 feet wide by 6 feet high, sold for $25,000, more than $500,000 today. At the time it was the highest price ever paid for an American painting.
But his popularity with patrons didn’t win Bierstadt much respect from his contemporaries. His paintings were criticized as overly romanticized and overtly commercial. In addition, fellow artists found the sheer size of his canvases especially irksome, dwarfing the works of his fellow exhibitors.
A third and final trek West to Yellowstone in 1871 produced a wealth of new material for the painter and apparently inspired Congress to pass the Yellowstone Park Bill in 1872, establishing the world’s first national park.
Rocky Mountain Landscape, 1871
His success at home paid for travels abroad and for several years he and Rosalie maintained studios in London, Paris and Rome. When Rosalie was diagnosed with tuberculosis, however, the Bierstadts retreated to the Bahamas. She died in 1892 at the age 52.
Just a year later, he wed the widow of a wealthy Boston banker, Mary Hicks Stewart, herself a painter. Despite his earlier success and his wife’s considerable fortune, Bierstadt was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1895. The fickle art market had tired of vast landscapes, preferring instead the more intimate impressionist style.
The world’s best-known painter of the West died unexpectedly on February 18, 1902 at age 72 in relative obscurity and was laid to rest near his parents in a rural New Bedford cemetery.
But Bierstadt managed to outlive his critics, He is now considered by many to be the premier landscape artist of the era, having produced some 500 paintings in half a century. In 2001 his “A Sioux Camp Near Laramie Peak” was sold at auction for $941,000. Bierstadts are now represented in collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and museums around the country . “Rocky Mountain’s Landers Peak now hangs in the White House.
“Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West,” featuring 30 paintings from private and institution collections, is planned for the summer and fall of 2018. Presented jointly by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo. (right), and the Gilcrease Museum of Tulsa, Okla., the exhibit is on view at the 
Center June 8 through September 30 and in Tulsa from November 3 through February 10, 2019. For more information go to centerofthewest.org or gilcrease.org.
Second best, however, an armchair exhibit of works by Albert Bierstadt is also available on YouTube. Hudson River scenes and a handful from his later years in the Caribbean are included but most are the sweeping landscapes from the American West that so enchanted the public and divided the art world. Just under 34 minutes, the video, “Albert Bierstadt: A collection of 404 paintings,” is presented without titles or commentary, informative nonetheless.
© Text Only – 2017 – Headin’ West LLC – All photos – public domain or fair use.