Albert bierstadt biography paintings of sunsets

Summary of Albert Bierstadt

Although taken to task by critics in his later years for being excessive and unrefined, Bierstadt is today widely considered one of America's greatest landscape artists; a man whose paintings offer a unique picture of American natural history during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Produced from photographs and sketches, he made epic panoramas of the untamed American West that proved immensely popular with the American public. Vast in scale, and overwhelming in their emotional impact, he applied color for romantic rather than naturalistic effect.

Strongly influenced by his tours of Europe, his paintings promoted the idea of conservation, culminating in the establishment of new National Parks, while at the same time highlighting the plight of Native Americans and the threat of extinction to the buffalo.

Accomplishments

• Bierstadt is linked to the second-generation of Hudson River School painters.

  Like his contemporaries Frederic Church and T