Albert Bierstadt Born in Solingen, Germany, near Dusseldorf, Albert Bierstadt grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts from the age of two. He returned to Dusseldorf in 1854 for three years of art study, and on his return to New Bedford joined other well-known landscape painters of the day in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The watershed event in Bierstadt's career took place in 1859, when he was invited to join the Lander survey expedition to the Pacific. Overwhelmed by the mountains of the West, he went on to found his career and reputation on large-scale images that made the region seem even more glorious than its impressive reality. Bierstadt's paintings are today widely seen as a prime element in encouraging Western migration and development in the United States. At the height of his career in the 1860s and 1870s, he was perhaps the most successful and renowned painter in America. Examples of his work are included in most major collections of American art. Though best known for his enormous, highly romanticized landscapes of a golden West, Bierstadt is at least equally admired for his smaller finished, less-idealized works and his accurate, perceptive on-site studies and oil sketches. One of his best known paintings, the small "The Wreck of the Ancon, Loring Bay, Alaska," at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, bears witness to the sinking of the steamship on which Bierstadt traveled the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska as far north as Glacier Bay in 1889.

Biography with permission from AskArt.com

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