Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902)

Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 16" x 20"
Frame Size: 28" x 32"
Condition: Great, No Blemishes
Signature: lower right

Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902) was active/lived in New York, California, Massachusetts, Kansas / Germany. Albert Bierstadt is known for Romanticized western landscape paintings, photography.

Bierstadt was the most famous 19th-century artist to visit Alaska. At the height of his career in the 1860s and 1870s, Bierstadt was perhaps the most successful and renowned painter in America, rivaled only perhaps by Frederic Church.

Sadly, Bierstadt lived long enough to see his romantic, grandiose, highly detailed paintings of the Western landscape go out of favor, replaced by more adventurous, modern sorts of painting, and he died an all but forgotten figure. More recently, his work has again been lionized, only to be re-attacked as an embodiment of the 'American capitalist spirit' that led to development of the West and devastating consequences for Native American cultures. The roller coaster of Bierstadt's reputation is as much the result of changing political climates as stylistic fashion.

By the early 1880s, his fortunes were waning as the art-loving public turned increasingly towards more modern modes of expression. One of his most grievous blows came from his fellow artists when the American selection committee for the Paris University Exposition of 1889 rejected his huge painting 'The Last of the Buffalo' (Corcoran Gallery, New York). Only a few months after this unexpected refusal, the artist traveled West by train from his home in New York to Victoria, B.C., and then north by steamer to Alaska on the steamer, Ancon. This was a time when many major American landscape painters were in search of inspiring scenery for their works. Soon after the United States occupied the Territory, of Alaska, many artists were attracted to go there, despite the distances and hardships involved.

Neither Bierstadt nor his fellow passengers could have known that it would be the ship's last journey. After stopping at Juneau, Ft. Wrangell, and Sitka, and touring Glacier Bay, the ship returned to the village of Loring, near Ketchikan on August 28, 1889. On departure, the Ancon drifted onto a reef and was wrecked. Bierstadt's 'The Wreck of the Ancon, Loring Bay, Alaska' (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) depicts the Ancon listing helplessly offshore. This stunning work, with the remote, abandoned ship isolated in motionless water and surrounded by a low fog, is a personal and very atypical example of the artist's work. It is, however, and probably the best known and most widely reproduced 19th century painting of Alaska.

PROVENANCE
private collection from Long Island

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