The German American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

The painting depicted below is not what most people consider a typical Albert Bierstadt landscape. It was created during the “tragedy” period of Bierstadt’s life and career. Many art critics, art historians, and collectors regard this particular painting as one of Albert Bierstadt’s best. Yet, when it was created in the 1880s, the artist could not find a buyer for it. At a 2018 Sotheby’s art auction the 18 by 32-inch oil-on-canvas painting had a suggested bid price of $700,000 to $1 million USD.

View of Nassau, Bahamas (c. 1880) is not a typical Bierstadt painting. It differs in significant ways from his better known American West mountain landscapes. PHOTO: Public Domain (Private collection)

It was created in a place that Bierstadt had come to know very well during the 17-year segment of his marriage to the love of his life, Rosalie “Rose” (née Osborne) Bierstadt, when she was battling tuberculosis by spending months at a time in Nassau at the Royal Victoria Hotel. The Royal Victoria was then a popular TB sanatorium for wealthy Americans who could afford lengthy healthcare stays in the Bahamas. Rosalie usually spent six or more months out of a year in Nassau, avoiding New York’s cold weather. Albert would visit her by taking a steamer from New York.

Rosalie was only 52 years old when she died in Nassau on 1 March 1893. Albert was in New York at the time. Her death came unexpectedly, and it plunged Albert into deep sorrow and depression. But the death of his beloved wife was not the only tragedy in Albert Bierstadt’s life. His wife had been diagnosed with consumption, the common term for tuberculosis at the time, in 1876. In 1882 a fire destroyed his mansion and art studio (known as the “Malkasten,” German for “paint box”) overlooking the Hudson River in Irvington, New York. Along with his studio, many of his paintings and other personal belongings collected over the years were lost forever. The house was never rebuilt.

Overriding all of this was yet another unavoidable dark cloud. By 1880, shortly after the time of his wife’s TB diagnosis, Bierstadt’s paintings had fallen out of favor with collectors and art critics. His artistic career had skyrocketed in the 1860s. His paintings of European and American scenic landscapes were highly sought after by wealthy art collectors and respected art museums and exhibitors. At his zenith, Bierstadt was getting $20,000 for his large landscapes, including his 1866 work, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie in Colorado, named for his wife (but later renamed Mt. Evans*), and his paintings were in very high demand. But nothing lasts forever. Stubborn to the end, Bierstadt felt that the critics were wrong not to appreciate his art in a style that had fallen out of favor.

The Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau, The Bahamas was built in 1861 during the American Civil War. Most of the structure was demolished after the hotel closed in 1971, leaving today’s Royal Victoria Gardens. Bierstadt’s wife died at the hotel in 1893. PHOTO: Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Bright Beginnings in New Bedford
Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Prussia – now in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany – on 7 January 1830. His father, Henry Bierstadt was a cooper. Albert emigrated to the United States with his parents and two brothers as a young child, and grew up in the port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, then a prominent whaling center and the setting for Herman Melville’s famous novel, Moby Dick (1851). Both of Albert’s older brothers, Charles and Edward, later became successful professional photographers in New York City. His younger sister Eliza was born in the US.

Düsseldorf and the Malkasten
Albert was a handsome young man of 23 when he left New Bedford aboard a sailing ship named the Porpoise for the country of his birth on 3 December 1853. Albert liked to draw and paint, but he lacked training. He was returning to Europe for an art education he had come to realize that he needed. His mother’s cousin, Johann Peter Hasenclever (1810-1853), was a well-known painter in Düsseldorf, not far from Solingen. With his ties to the Düsseldorf art community, Hasenclever could help pave the way for Albert to study there. He had agreed to host Albert and help him with his training.

Bierstadt arrived in Düsseldorf on the evening of Christmas Eve, but there was a slight problem. Hasenclever, his contact, had died unexpectedly in his mid-forties on 16 December, just as Albert’s ship was about halfway across the Atlantic. His well-laid plans had crumbled, but he met two noted artists who helped him and would later become his good friends: the American Worthington Whittredge of Cincinnati, and the German-born Emmanuel Leutze, best known for Washington Crossing the Delaware, a large, epic painting that the artist was just starting at the time of Bierstadt’s arrival. (A fire in 1850 damaged the original. Leutze painted a second version, the one that now hangs in Washington, DC.) Their informal art school in Düsseldorf, known as the Malkasten (paint box), would end up providing Bierstadt the instruction he so desperately needed. He was now part of an artists brotherhood, aided by the fact that the Malkasten had been founded by Albert’s relative, the late Johann Hasenclever.

Albert would remain in Düsseldorf and Europe, traveling, painting, and studying with several Malkasten painters for over three years. In fact he soon became good enough to be unjustly accused by a detractor in the US of falsely claiming that the paintings he had been sending to New Bedford were his work, when they were, so it was claimed, actually done by Whittredge. This minor scandal was cleared up after several respected Malkasten artists, including Leutze, wrote letters attesting that the paintings in question were indeed the work of Albert Bierstadt.

In July 1856, with money earned by selling some of his paintings in the US, Albert joined Whittredge and two other Malkasten artist friends for a European painting tour of Switzerland and Italy that included instruction by local artists along the way. Many of Albert’s “plein-air” oil studies made on the spot during this tour would later inspire large famous Bierstadt Alpine paintings. Bierstadt would later transfer this European inspiration into the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, and other scenic North American landscapes.

By late September the touring artists were in Italy, headed for Florence and Rome. The group spent a rather cold, damp winter in Rome taking in 1856 Rome (pop. 200,000) and its antiquities. In the spring they also enjoyed Carnival and nearby vineyards. In May the four split up to head to various destinations. They had no way of knowing that they would all be living and working as artists in New York City in several years.

Albert Bierstadt. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The Düsseldorf School and the Hudson River School
Bierstadt spent three-and-a-half years in Düsseldorf and Europe. He returned to the US in July 1857. Back in New Bedford, Bierstadt held several exhibitions before moving to America’s art capital at the time, New York City. In an effort to gain better recognition as an artist, in 1858 Bierstadt applied to and was accepted by the National Academy of Design (NAD) for their annual exhibition. Among the paintings he exhibited was a large 7×10-foot landscape of Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstättersee), based on his earlier travels and sketches in Switzerland. It earned him positive reviews and membership in the NAD. Lake Lucerne was later sold to a Boston collector for $925, a considerable sum in 1858. (The Lake Lucerne painting is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.)

Back in the US, Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River Valley. He became part of a group of artists known as the Hudson River School. But it was not long before he joined a new generation of noted American artist-adventurers. Along with Frederic Edwin Church and William Bradford in the 1860s and 1870s, Albert Bierstadt joined a cadre of American artists who ventured into the natural environment they wanted to depict. Bierstadt staked out his claim in the American West, painting in a style that reflected both the Düsseldorf School and the Hudson River School. But very few of the Hudson River artists were artist-adventurers like Bierstadt, who specialized in large-format scenic paintings that sold for more than $5,000. (His friend and teacher, Leutze, was also a proponent of large-format paintings.)

Bierstadt, however, took marketing and salesmanship to an extreme that few of his competitors could match, or wanted to. He joined an exclusive group of artists whose paintings were in high demand at high prices. These men (there were few if any women in this club) became wealthy members of high society. In 1867, Albert and his wife did a grand tour of Europe that included a special audience with Queen Victoria. His painting, Among the Sierra Mountains, California, was exhibited at the Royal Academy of London. He had arrived, and he was enjoying it.

Bierstadt was a master of self-promotion, often to a disturbing degree. That is not to say that he did not love art and believe in what he was doing. He has been praised, then and now, for his role in popularizing nature and scenic wilderness places that few people had ever seen, as well as being an advocate for Native American culture at a time when most people viewed Indians as wild savages.

Bierstadt’s Twilight Years and Legacy
Albert Bierstadt remarried about a year after Rosalie’s death in 1893. Although Mary Hicks Stewart was a wealthy widow, the couple kept their finances separate. Albert declared bankruptcy in 1895, but he continued to paint. By all accounts, their marriage was a happy one. As a wedding gift, Albert gave Mary his historical painting, Landing of Columbus, which following his death, she donated to the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

By the time Albert Bierstadt died on 18 February 1902, he was almost totally forgotten. There were very few obituaries. The once very famous artist would remain in obscurity for another 60 years. In the 1960s his paintings were rediscovered and there was a revival of interest in his work. Today Bierstadt oils hang in the White House and at the Smithsonian, in addition to many other public and private galleries in the US and around the globe. In recent years his works have been selling at art auctions for six and seven-figure prices. In 2008, Bierstadt’s Indians Spear Fishing sold at a Christie’s auction for over $7 million.

Personally I prefer the style of Bierstadt’s Bahamian paintings. They are more accurate representations of his subjects – unlike his enhanced, overly romanticized paintings of the American West. Bierstadt’s Lake Tahoe (1868), lovely as it is, looks nothing like the real Lake Tahoe that I have seen. His famous Yosemite paintings suffer from a similar borrowing from Bierstadt’s native landscapes in Europe. His Sierra Nevada works often look more like the Alps on steroids. No less a figure than Mark Twain also noticed Bierstadt’s lack of authenticity: “This man has surely imported this atmosphere from some foreign country, because nothing like it was ever seen in California…” In 1867, Twain wrote that Bierstadt’s giant-sized The Domes of Yosemite was “very beautiful, considerably more beautiful than the original.” (See photo below.)

Bierstadt’s The Domes of Yosemite (1867) is the largest existing example of his American West paintings. Following its restoration in 2017, the 10-by-15-foot work is again on display at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Although his often “too gorgeous” American West oils far outnumber his tropical landscape paintings, Bierstadt did create quite a few works in the Bahamas during the years he was visiting Rosalie in Nassau. Paintings such as Nassau Harbor (1877), Street in Nassau (1878), The Shore of the Turquoise Sea (1878), and A View of the Bahamas (1879) are all brighter and warmer, often with splashes of bright color only seen previously in some of his Italian paintings. I think his works from the Bahamas are also better because Bierstadt was painting more for himself than for collectors. His Bahamas paintings were done at a later time in his life, and the realistic atmosphere of his semitropical seascapes and landscapes emerged true-to-life and unembellished.

There is much more to be said about Bierstadt’s interesting life and career, and we hope to have a more comprehensive Albert Bierstadt biography for our German Way readers in the near future. There is at least one Bierstadt biography in book form, but it has its problems. You may want to try the latest revised 2021 edition of David Delo’s 2012 historical novel about Bierstadt. See the links below for both editions (neither one is available in print). As far as I can tell, they differ only in the title and cover art. The 2021 edition is also cheaper than the original.

– HF

BIERSTADT BOOKS
There are not any true Bierstadt biographies in English that I know of, although coffee table volumes displaying his paintings are easy to find (for a price). The “historical novel” by David M. Delo (below) is informative but could have used better writing and editing. Just one example of many: The name of a main figure in Bierstadt’s life, Johann Hasenclever, is consistently misspelled as “Hansenclever” in both the 2012 and 2021 editions.

The Rise and Fall of Albert Bierstadt: Artist-Priest of the West
Revised Kindle Edition (2021)
A historical novel by David M. Delo – Amazon.com – Kindle only

The Heroic Journey of Albert Bierstadt: Artist-Priest of the West
Kindle edition (2012)
A historical novel by David M. Delo – Amazon.com – Kindle only

*In recent years the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has received four proposals to change the name of Mount Evans, the 14,265-foot peak that honors John Evans, Colorado’s second territorial governor, because of Evans’ involvement in and his attempt to cover up the Sand Creek Massacre of Indian women and children in 1864. (Evans was forced to resign as governor.) One of those proposed new names is Bierstadt’s original name for the peak, which remained in use until at least 1895, although Mount Rosalie still appeared on some maps after that. In fact there is some confusion about which summit Bierstadt named in 1863, when Rosalie was still married to his traveling companion, the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Not only that, but there are two summits named Mount Evans in Colorado, with Mount Evans B in the Leadville District.
Source: How Mount Rosalie Became Mount Evans…for Now (22 Dec. 2020)
Lake Bierstadt in the Colorado Rockies is named for the painter himself. There is also a Rosalie Peak in Colorado.