7/24/2025

A brief introduction to Albert Bierstadt, one of the greatest landscape painters who ever lived...

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The Cultural Tutor

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The Cultural Tutor

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Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was born in Germany but moved to Massachusetts with his family before his second birthday. As a young boy Bierstadt started to paint. He returned to Europe — Düsseldorf — to train, and there turned his hand to landscapes.

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The Cultural Tutor

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When Bierstadt returned to America, already a mature landscape artist, he joined the Hudson River School. This was a group of American landscape painters under the tutelage of Thomas Cole, an Englishman who had moved to New York and fallen in love with its natural beauty.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Cole and his disciples painted the vast, open, and untamed American wilderness; for them it was a place of seemingly endless sublimity. His foremost student was Frederic Edwin Church, who became perhaps the greatest of the Hudson River School.

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The Cultural Tutor

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But if Cole and Church were the painters of New England (and in Church's case also of the Andes!), Bierstadt was the painter of California and the Rockies. He travelled west and found a world grander in scale than he had ever seen — and he dedicated his life to painting it.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt and the Hudson River School were essentially American Romantics. European Romanticism, represented in art by the likes of Caspar David Friedrich and JMW Turner, depicted nature as mighty but unknowable, beautiful but wrathful, and inevitably triumphant over mankind.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Love of Nature was central to Romanticism, defending it against Rationality and Science, which threatened to destroy its beauty and mystery. But the Americans painted Nature with a greater sense of optimism; of communion, rather than struggle, between humanity and nature.

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The Cultural Tutor

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And that lies at the heart of Bierstadt's glorious landscapes. He, like the rest of the Hudson River School, mastered the art of creating vast, highly detailed, perfectly finished, majestic, almost photorealistic scenes in which every detail is iridescent.

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The Cultural Tutor

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But Bierstadt, in his lifetime and since, had been criticised by some for being too realistic. They ask, "what did he do that a camera couldn't?" This is simply untrue. Bierstadt, like all the great artists, did not merely paint what he saw — he painted what he felt.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Canaletto in 18th century Venice also painted "photorealistic" scenes of the city. But that isn't quite right — Canaletto often rearranged scenes, moving buildings, changing their architecture or shape, in order to create a more perfectly composed, more captivating picture.

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The Cultural Tutor

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And Bierstadt did the same thing with his landscapes. Were the clouds *really* like that when Bierstadt saw them at Lake Tahoe? And did the mountains *really* rise to such sharp peaks? No. And yet this is not entirely unrealistic. It is somewhere between realism and idealism.

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The Cultural Tutor

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So Bierstadt was treading a fine line between truth and fantasy, between realism and idealism. But what else have artists ever done? And thus some critics even made the opposite accusation: that his landscapes were purely imaginary!

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt, like Canaletto and Turner before him, "rearranged" his scenes. But that is because what he aimed at was not a perfect recreation of a landscape; it was a recreation of how it felt to look upon that landscape. A subtle but profoundly important difference.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Hence the feeling we get from Bierstadt's art is the same feeling he had when looking upon, say, the Yosemite Valley. It may not actually look *exactly* like that; but, for him and for many others, this is how it feels to look upon the valley. Art more truthful than fact.

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The Cultural Tutor

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For Bierstadt, the mountains were not only big: they were majestic. Stormclouds were not only grey: they were terror-inducing and awe-inspiring. Lakes were not only reflective: they were peaceful. The sky was not only blue: it was heavenly.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Thus he gives us the impression of mountains on an almost incomprehensible scale, lofty and snowbound, towering into the clouds above great green valleys, forests, waterfalls, and lakes. All perfectly framed by the waterfront, close to the viewer, to ground us in this world.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt and the Hudson River School paid close attention to light. It was their primary means of emotional expression; the magic with which they conjured such striking and theatrical natural landscapes. Worlds split between darkness and light; details shimmering with gold.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt's method was to make preparatory sketches and drawings on his expeditions and then return home, where he used those sketches to create his colossal, minutely detailed, glittering landscapes. He painted Among the Sierra Nevada while he was in Rome!

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The Cultural Tutor

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And, at times, Bierstadt indulged in a certain European Romanticism, crossing over from the optimistic grandeur and glowing beauty of the American Romantics. Notice, here, how Bierstadt has dramatically reduced his usually vivid colours. No gold; only grey. Solemn & brooding.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt was also a talented maritime painter — waves and water gave him the chance to experiment with light and colour and create that shimmering, irridescent quality so typical of the Hudson River School.

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The Cultural Tutor

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But it was in the vast and open wilderness that Bierstadt felt most at home. And rather than the dark and stormy colours of European Romanticism it was the vivid green and — above all — the gold of his American homeland that Bierstadt loved most.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Bierstadt returned to Europe often, whether Berlin or London (where Queen Victoria viewed his paintings in a private reception!), and especially Switzerland. He was, at his zenith, a hugely successful and popular artist who sold paintings for vast sums.

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The Cultural Tutor

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But, toward the end of his life, Bierstadt's Romantic landscapes fell from favour. The artistic establishment, influenced by Europe, was turning toward Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, represented in the US by the so-called Ashcan School.

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The Cultural Tutor

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Some have said that Bierstadt was a tool of American propaganda, whether to entice migration from Europe or push for westward expansion in the States. And yet Bierstadt's contemporaries criticised him for "ruining" landscapes by painting the Native Americans who lived there!

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The Cultural Tutor

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Thus it is difficult, if not useless, to say what "side" Bierstadt belonged to, or to accuse him of having any agenda other than a lifelong passion for the majesty of the natural world. And that, above all, is his artistic legacy — to remind us that Nature is sublime.

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