Albert Bierstadt was an American landscape artist who became famous for his paintings of the American West.  His majestic panoramas were created in his studio from sketches he did while on location during an 1859 surveying trip to the Rockies.  Two of his most famous paintings.  Rocky Mountain (1853) and Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1859) are currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  

His sweeping portrayals of western natural scenery became the standard of his day.  This became the way many viewed the beauty of the west.  He approached the subject in a romanticized grandeur as he depicted mountains, lakes, waterfalls and wildlife.  The use of fog and haze simulated the atmosphere, contributed to the vastness of the area,  and illustrated the rugged life in the west. 

When Bierstadt was about three years old, his family moved from Germany to New Bedford, Massachusetts.  He returned to Dusseldorf, Germany between 1853 and 1857 to study painting at the prestigious Dusseldorf Akademie.  On his return to the United States, he organized an exhibition in New Bedford of 150 paintings, including works of all the major artists of his day.  In December, 1857 the Boston Athenaeum bought one of his works, The Portico of Octavia Rome, and thereby assured his career.

 While peers from the Hudson River Valley group of artists were painting landscapes of that part of New York, Albert Bierstadt sought views that were much more remote.  Starting in 1858, Bierstadt made a number of trips west to explore the beauty of America.  He went with Colonel Frederick Landers and the federal surveying group to California and saw Yosemite.  The drawings and paintings he made while  there and, from sketches, when he returned home, gave Americans in the East their first images of the Sierra Nevada Mountains!  Bierstadt painted a vision of harmony between man and nature, rather than an image of nature being a hostile force for man to conquer.  While  dramatic and even dynamic, his pictures are romantic and peaceful.

Bierstadt and other artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles M.  Russell became known for their depictions of western lands.  They documented  people on the Oregon Trail and  documented the Indian cultures, which would soon be nearly destroyed.

Bierstadt always loved mountains, and he became internationally renowned for his beautiful and enormous paintings of the newly accessible American west.  His works found their way into public and private collections at staggeringly high prices for his time. At the height of his career Bierstadt was able to command $25,000 a canvas, which was the highest sum ever paid for American painting at that time. His popularity and wealth rose to tremendous heights only to fade as the interest in the Boston School and impressionism turned public taste away from his highly detailed landscapes suffused with golden light.  By 1895 he declared himself bankrupt.  He died in February of 1902 in New York City.