Albert Bierstadt

Bierstadt came of age in the United States and later returned to his native Germany to study painting at the famed Dusseldorf Academy in 1853. After producing grandiose Alpine landscapes there, he returned to America where he was invited to join the 1858 Lander expedition that surveyed a wagon road from Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to the Pacific.

His spectacular Rocky Mountain landscapes were immediately popular and sold for record prices. He returned three times to the American West during the 1860s and 1870s and produced his extraordinary paintings of the California High Sierra. His images of Yosemite were among the first images the world saw of the wonders of the American West.

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