Albert Bierstadt
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 | Wooded Hillside | Indians Travelling near Fort Laramie | Prong-Horned Antelope | Wind River Mountains Nebraska Territory | Related Artists: Samuel De WildeBritish 1748-1832,English painter and etcher of Dutch descent. He was the son of a Dutch joiner who had settled in London by 1748. On 19 November 1765 he was apprenticed for seven years to his godfather, Samuel Haworth, a joiner in London. However, he left after five years and enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in 1769. He exhibited small portraits at the Society of Artists (1776-8) and at the Royal Academy (from 1778), where he also showed fancy pictures of banditti in the style of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. But the genre that he made very much his own was theatrical portraiture: he exhibited theatrical portraits at the Royal Academy almost every year from 1792 to 1821. Louis-Jean-Francois LagreneeFrench Neoclassical Painter, 1725-1805 Hubert Vos(1855-1935) was a Dutch painter who was born in Maastricht on February 15, 1855. He studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and with Fernand Cormon (1845-1924) in Paris. He exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dresden and Munich. From 1885 to 1892, he worked in England, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1888 and 1891. He was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.
In 1898, he visited Hawaii, where he painted the local people. In that same year, Vos traveled to Korea, where he completed at least three paintings in duplicate. In each case, he left one copy in Korea and kept one copy. The paintings are a life-sized portrait of Emperor Gojong, a portrait of Min Sang-ho (1870-1933) and a landscape of Seoul. The copies left in Korea hung in the Deoksugung Palace until all except the landscape of Seoul, were destroyed by fire in 1904. In 1905, on his second and last trip around the world.
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