ALBERT BIERSTADT (American 1830 - 1902). Deep in the Rockies. Oil on paper on panel. 18 x 25-½in.. Signed lower right, ...

Description

ALBERT BIERSTADT (American 1830 - 1902)
Deep in the Rockies
Oil on paper on panel
18 x 25-½in.
Signed lower right, ABierstadt [AB in ligature]

PROVENANCE:
Newhouse Galleries, New York, NY;
Mr. and Mrs. F. Howard Walsh, Fort Worth, Texas;
Walsh Family Art Trust

German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) is best known for his huge, panoramic landscapes of the then-unsettled American West. Like Frederic Church before him, and Thomas Moran who became one of his fiercest artistic competitors, Bierstadt was a highly ambitious painter who traveled widely in search of material for his grand landscapes of America's natural beauty. As studies for the monumental canvases he produced later in the studio, Bierstadt made numerous field sketches from life in oil on paper, canvas, and board. These more intimate efforts, including the exceptionally well-painted Deep in the Rockies, have a marvelous immediacy that often holds greater appeal to modern sensibilities than his theatrical finished efforts.

Albert Bierstadt had the distinct advantage of being better training than most American artists who ventured west to record the scenery. He had studied for three years at the Düsseldorf Academy, had painted in Italy, and, perhaps most importantly, had learned how to paint mountains by painting the Alps. In Boston and his hometown of New Bedford, Massachusetts (where his parents had settled upon arriving in the United States), he enjoyed early success with his paintings of landscape and European genre, due in no small measure to a talent for self-promotion. At the height of his career, he kept a New York studio, lived in a mansion on the Hudson, and kept company with European royalty and American presidents. But once the vogue for his detailed panoramic views faded after the Civil War, his fortunes declined, too.

Beginning in 1858, Bierstadt made the first of his trips west. For his initial venture he joined an expedition under Frederick W. Lander to survey a wagon road from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to the Pacific. In 1860 he exhibited the first of his Rocky Mountain landscapes at the National Academy of Design in New York, winning immediate election to that body. Thus encouraged, he made subsequent trips west in 1863, 1866, and 1872, laying the foundations for large-scale canvases that proved to be enormously popular with the public and brought record prices. After exploring the mountains on his initial trip, Bierstadt wrote a letter to The Crayon, an artistic journal, declaring the Rockies true rivals of the Alps. His honest enthusiasm for the Rockies marked the beginning of his occupation with the subject that was to bring him fame and enormous fortune. Because of Bierstadt's interest in mountain landscapes, Mount Bierstadt in Colorado is named in his honor.

Although the particular arrangement of pines and deciduous trees in the present sketch cannot be traced to a specific large-scale work by Bierstadt, it resembles the subject of a smaller landscape on canvas in the permanent collection of the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey (Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt. Painter of the American West, New York, 1973, no. CL-156, ill.). Although it is made from life, and records the arbitrary arrangement of plants growing in the wilderness, the painting nonetheless has a clarity of tone and color placement that the makes the scene spatially convincing. This skill was one Bierstadt translated into his more orchestrated compositions, where readability on a large scale was a requisite for artistic success.



More information about ALBERT BIERSTADT. See also: Bierstadt, Albert, Albert Bierstadt Artist.

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