German-born American Hudson River School Painter, 1830-1902 Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany. His family moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1833. He studied painting with the members of the D??sseldorf School in D??sseldorf, Germany from 1853 to 1857. He taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself to painting. Bierstadt began making paintings in New England and upstate New York. In 1859, he traveled westward in the company of a Land Surveyor for the U.S. government, returning with sketches that would result in numerous finished paintings. In 1863 he returned west again, in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he would later marry. He continued to visit the American West throughout his career. Though his paintings sold for princely sums, Bierstadt was not held in particularly high esteem by critics of his day. His use of uncommonly large canvases was thought to be an egotistical indulgence, as his paintings would invariably dwarf those of his contemporaries when they were displayed together. The romanticism evident in his choices of subject and in his use of light was felt to be excessive by contemporary critics. His paintings emphasized atmospheric elements like fog, clouds and mist to accentuate and complement the feel of his work. Bierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed is the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc. The shift from foreground to background was very dramatic and there was almost no middle distance Nonetheless, his paintings remain popular. He was a prolific artist, having completed over 500 (possibly as many as 4000) paintings during his lifetime, most of which have survived. Many are scattered through museums around the United States. Prints are available commercially for many. Original paintings themselves do occasionally come up for sale, at ever increasing prices.  Related Paintings of Albert Bierstadt :. | Rocky Mountains | Men in Two Canoes | In_the_Mountains | Sunset in the Rockies | Tyrolean Landscape |
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Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes
(December 6, 1750 - February 16, 1819) was a French painter. Valenciennes worked in Rome from 1778 to 1782, where he made a number of landscape studies directly from nature, sometimes painting the same set of trees or house at different times of day.He theorized on this idea in Advice to a Student on Painting, Particularly on Landscape (1800), developing a concept of a "landscape portrait" in which the artist paints a landscape directly while looking upon it, taking care to capture its particular details.Although he spoke of this as a type of painting mainly of interest to "amateurs", as distinguished from the higher art of the academies, he found it of great interest, and of his own works the surviving landscape portraits have been the most noted by later commentators. He in particular urged artists to capture the distinctive details of a scene's architecture, dress, agriculture, and so on, in order to give the landscape a sense of belonging to a specific place; in this he probably influenced other French artists active in Italy who took an anthropological approach to painting rural areas and customs, such as Hubert Robert, Pierre-Athanase Chauvin and Achille-Etna Michallon.
Eugene de Blaas
Austrian Academic Painter, 1843-1931
James Stark
(November 19, 1794 - March 24, 1859) was an English landscape painter of the "Norwich School".Stark was born in Norwich, the youngest son of distinguished dyer Michael Stark (1748-1831, Scottish), and showed a talent for art from an early age. He was educated at the Grammar School where he was friends with John Berney Crome. He was then apprenticed for 3 years to John Berney's father, distinguished landscape artist John Crome, from 1811. In that same years he exhibited work at the Norwich Society of Artists (being elected a member in 1812,) and his work "A view on King Street river, Norwich" was shown by the Royal Academy, London. In 1814 he moved to London, exhibiting at the British Institution between 1814-18, winning a prize of £50 in 1818. In 1817 he entered the Royal Academy as a student, and eventually began to receive commissions for his work. Ill health forced Stark to return to Norwich after only 2 years study. There he devoted himself to painting the scenery around the city and executed a series of paintings of Norfolk rivers which were eventually engraved and published in 1834. In 1821 he married Elizabeth Younge Dinmore (d. 1834-35). In 1830, he again settled in London, taking up residence in Chelsea, and exhibited at the British Institution, Royal Academy and Society of British Artists. In 1839, he moved to Windsor, painting many pictures of the scenery of the Thames, but moved back to London in 1849 in order to further his son's education in art. Stark died at Mornington Place, Camden, London, in March 1859. Stark's only son, Arthur James Stark (1831-1902), born in Chelsea, London, became a landscapes and animal painter. On a few of his father's pictures he was employed to draw the cattle.