Artist: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902)
Title: Bavarian Landscape
Genre: landscape art
Date: possibly between 1853 and 1857
What I love about this painting:
Albert Bierstadt is one of my favorite artists. He loved the power of nature. His colors are strong, and he employs contrast to good effect. In this painting of cattle in a field, he manages to make even the simplest scene feel epic.
This is one of his earlier works, but the sky is pure Bierstadt—immense, powerful, the vaults of heaven reigning over the world below.
We see a lush, fertile farm with healthy cattle in the foreground. The dark clouds in the distance tell us a summer storm looms, but for us, the sun still shines overhead.
About the artist, via Wikipedia:
Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Bierstadt was born in Prussia, but his family moved to the United States when he was one year old. He returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along the Hudson River. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. Bierstadt was an important interpreter of the western landscape, and he is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.
In 1851, Bierstadt began to paint in oils. He returned to Germany in 1853 and studied painting for several years in Düsseldorf with members of its informal school of painting. After returning to New Bedford in 1857, he taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself full-time to painting.
Bierstadt’s popularity in the U.S. remained strong during his European tour. The publicity generated by his Yosemite Valley paintings in 1868 led a number of explorers to request his presence as part of their westward expeditions. The Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad also commissioned him to visit and paint the Grand Canyon and surrounding region.
Despite his popular success, Bierstadt was criticized by some contemporaries for the romanticism evident in his choice of subjects and for his use of light, which they found excessive.
Some critics objected to Bierstadt’s paintings of Native Americans based on their belief that including Indigenous Americans “marred” the “impression of solitary grandeur.”
Credits and Attributions:
IMAGE: Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Bierstadt Albert Bavarian Landscape.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Bierstadt_Albert_Bavarian_Landscape.jpg&oldid=823443562 (accessed May 2, 2024).
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 