Happy Birthday, Albert Bierstadt!

During his lifetime, Bierstadt (1830–1902) was one of the country's leading landscape painters.

After an initial trip in 1859, Albert Bierstadt traveled often to the American West to capture the exalted mountains and glorious vistas of the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the California coast. He worked from small sketches and photographs to create composite scenes that emphasize some views and compress others. His reconfiguration of such natural wonders as Yosemite's El Capitan, seen here in the distance, won both praise and criticism. Some faulted his topographical inaccuracy, while others praised his idealism. A critic summed up the power of the painting during an exhibition in Boston in 1869: "It is a scene which does not exist, and in fact hardly could exist, but yet is most imposing and fascinating. It is the perfect type of the American idea of what our scenery ought to be, if it is not so in reality."

Source: Gwen Everett. Permanent Gallery Installation (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Among the Sierra Nevada,1868, oil, 72 x 120 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Helen Huntington Hull, granddaughter of William Brown Dinsmore, who acquired the painting in 1873 for "The Locusts," the family estate in Dutchess County, New York.