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Albert Bierstadt is known
for spectacular landscapes of the American West with grandiose
proportions and meticulous attention to detail, a characteristic
of works by artists trained at Germany's Düsseldorf Academy.
He portrayed the beauty of the American wilderness with a sense of
great national pride, conveying intimacy and sentiment to
replace the controlled and impersonal panoramas of the previous
decade. His later works are prized for their spontaneity and
intensity of observation.
Born in Solingen, Germany, on January 7, 1830, Bierstadt emigrated
with his family two years later to New Bedford, Massachusetts.
He was teaching, painting, and exhibiting there by 1851. In
1855 Bierstadt returned to Europe for two years of study at the
Düsseldorf Academy. He resumed exhibiting his work in the
United States in 1857 until April of 1859, when he joined the
Pacific Coast Railway Survey in Wyoming. In 1863 he visited
Yosemite Valley, producing a series of images of the Rocky
Mountains that made him one of the most popular painters of the
1860s.
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