Works by Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt sold tickets to see his big canvases of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite; in Among the Sierra Nevada and Mount Starr King, sun breaks through storm cloud above still water, with elk or small figures beside it.

His family took him from Solingen to New Bedford, Massachusetts, as a small child; in 1853 he returned to Germany to study in Düsseldorf. In 1859 Bierstadt went west with the surveyor Frederick W. Lander, then made his own sketches into paintings in New York. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, completed in 1863, sets a camp of tepees and horses on a meadow below a waterfall and white peaks; it sold for $25,000 in 1865.

In 1863 he spent seven weeks in Yosemite Valley with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and studies from that trip fed large exhibition pictures through the 1860s. In Mount Starr King, Yosemite, sun breaks through cloud over the distant peak at centre while two Native Americans and a packhorse stand small on the meadow. Such canvases were unveiled as shows, with tickets sold, stories planted in the press and drapes drawn back in a darkened room.

Among the Sierra Nevada, California was painted in his Rome studio and shown in Berlin and London before it was shipped to America; elk wade at a still lake under waterfalls and sunlit snow peaks. Most works below are landscapes, often with mountains, forest and water; a few are coasts, like Farallon Island, where sea lions crowd a rock arch beside a breaking wave. In The Last of the Buffalo, of 1888–89, a rider on a rearing white horse raises a spear over a charging bison among skulls.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art.