German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | Merced River in Yosemite | The Landing of Columbus | Conway Valley New Hampshire | View of Chimney Rock, Ogalillalh Sioux Village in Foreground | Autumn Woods |
Related Artists:
CODDE, Pieter
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1599-1678 Dutch painter and poet. Frans Hals was once thought to have been his teacher, but there is no evidence for this. It is possible that Codde studied with a portrait painter, perhaps Barent van Someren (1572/3-1632) or Cornelis van der Voort (1576-1624), since most of his earliest works, from the period 1623-7, seem to be portraits. His earliest known dated work is the Portrait of a Young Man (1626; Oxford, Ashmolean), which precedes by a year his earliest dated genre piece, the Dancing Lesson (1627; Paris, Louvre). He was particularly productive in the 1620s and 1630s, painting mainly interior genre scenes. After the mid-1640s only portraits and a few history paintings, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds
Frederick Friesek
1874-1939 Frederick Friesek Galleries
William Herbert Dunton
a self-taught artist . American Painter , 1878-1936 was an American artist who was one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists and part of the Taos art colony. He first came to Taos, New Mexico, in 1912. Among his proteges in Western art was Harold Dow Bugbee of Clarendon and Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.