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Albert Bierstadt |
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Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1867) |
Born in Solingen, Germany, Albert Bierstadt emigrated with his parents to New Bedford, Massachusetts at the age of 2. By the early 1850s, he was working as a painter and collaborator in a range of visual arts, including daugerrotype representations of New England landscape. In in 1859, Bierstadt accompanied Colonel Frederick Lander's goverment expedition to the Colorado and Wyoming terretories in order create sketches for a series of large-scale landscape paintings. Bierstadt made two further trips to the American West in 1863 and 1871-7 that built on the success of his first spectacular depictions of the Rocky Mountains. His painting The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove, clearly draws on Carleton Watkins' Grizzly Giant as its source, again underscoring the close relationship between landscape painting and photography at the time. While Bierstadt was later criticized for his prolific output, his work continues to find support, particularly among conservationists. |