Bierstadt's family left Germany in 1832, settling in New Bedford, Massachusetts. No details concerning Bierstadt's early development as an artist have come to light. However, in 1850 he advertised himself as teaching monochromatic painting in New Bedford, and began to exhibit his work in that city and in Boston. He is also known to have been working as a daguerreotypist for the next three years. In 1853 Bierstadt returned to Germany to study at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art. There he became friends with fellow-student Thomas Worthington Whittredge with whom he visited Italy in 1856. Bierstadt remained in Rome for a year before returning to New Bedford.
On his first appearance in an Academy annual exhibition in 1858, he was elected to membership--honorary, as he was not a resident of New York. The same year he organized a major exhibition of American art for New Bedford, which included fifteen of his own works.
In 1859, Bierstadt made his first trip West with a government survey team in the charge of Colonel Frederick W. Lander. Upon his return, Bierstadt took a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York and began the series of western landscapes which gained him national and later, international fame. The artist again traveled West in 1863, this time in the company of Fitz Hugh Ludlow. These trips resulted in some of Bierstadt's best known monumental landscapes, including The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, based on studies made on his first trip and finished in 1863 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Storm in the Rocky Mountains, 1866, (The Brooklyn Museum, New York).
In 1865 Bierstadt had work begun on a house and studio, at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Malkasten, German for "paint box," was the name he gave to the mansion which was completed in 1866 with proceeds from the sale of The Rocky Mountains. He toured Europe from 1867 to 1869, where among other attentions he was awarded the Legion of Honor by Napoleon III.
Bierstadt went to the West again in 1871, excepting a brief return to New York that year, remaining in California into 1974. He continued to produce dramatic Western scenery, which for a time enlarged his public esteem and his fortunes. A consistent exhibitor in Academy annuals, he served on its Council for the 1874-75 term. He made frequent trips to Europe, the last being in 1891. He also visited Canada, the West Indies, and the Bahamas.
But by the 1880s critical and public tastes began to turn away from him and the highly finished, highly staged compositions that were his stock-in-trade. Malkasten was destroyed by fire in 1882. Seven years later, Bierstadt received a severe blow to his waning career when his Last of the Buffalo was rejected by the jury of the Paris Exposition. By 1895 the artist was bankrupt. Bierstadt last showed in an Academy annual exhibition in 1888; the last known appearance of his work in a public exhibition during his lifetime was at the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum in 1901.
At the annual meeting of May 14, 1902 the Academy memorialized members lost to death during the previous year. The eulogy entered into record for Bierstadt at once reveals the personal respect in which he was held, and the memberships' acceptance of the concensus that he had outlived the validity of his art.
. . . Mr. Bierstadt was elected an NA in 1860, he was decorated by the Emperor of the French with the cross of the Legion of Honor, by the Czar of Russia with two degrees of the order of St. Stanislaus and by the Sultan of Turkey with the Imperial order of the Medgidii, he received medals from Austria, Germany, Bavaria, and Belgium. Albert Bierstadt was second to none in his success in calling the attention of the world to our landscape art and to the striking features and magnificence of American scenery. Mr. Bierstadt had not been identified for many years either with the exhibitions or the management of the Academy. From this it must not be inferred that he was lacking in interest and pride in the institution; on the contrary up to within a very short time of his death he was exerting himself in furthering among his friends the plans which we are entertaining for the future - and he has steadily maintained that in all larger Art movements of the city and Country, the Academy must be in the lead. As in his art so in his views of these plans of ours he was by temperment inclined to schemes that are characterized by largeness of scale and ambition or boldness of conception.
Mr. Bierstadt's death has removed from the ranks of living Academicians a strong and interesting personality.
In illustration of the fact that Albert Bierstadt gave expression by his art to a phase of the National character of his time it may be permitted to quote from the editorial pages of our dailies the following:
"Bierstadt's was a name comparatively unheard of late, although he represented a very characteristic movement in American art. Trained in the painful methods of the Dsseldorf Schools, he gave himself to the painting of the panoramic landscape of the West. In this field he encountered as his friendly rivals Moran and Church.
"Their common effort was to render the grandiose effects of American scenery, particularly that of the Rockies and the Sierras. The attempt corresponded very closely to the mood of America in the time immediately preceeding and following the Civil War. In fact, the taste for wild scenery, held by European Romanticists, as a fad, is probably deeply felt only by Americans among civilized nations.
"In view of this fact, it is a pity that Bierstadt and his fellow-painters through various technical deficiencies, seldom achieved anything beyond somewhat crude panoramic effects.
"The tendency now is away from these painters of the West. Small, intimate, and tame landscape is the preference of our foreign-trained painters. And yet the time will come when our painters will try to render something of the sublimity of nature, as well as its intimate charm. When that time comes the late Mr. Bierstadt will have the recognition which belongs to a pioneer. Even now his great paintings, like the "Valley of the Yosemite" at the Lennox Library, must, for the largeness of their intentions at least command great interest and respect."
