Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter who gave nineteenth century Americans their first grand look at the western frontier. Born in Prussia in 1830 and raised in Massachusetts, he joined survey expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada and came back with sketches he worked up into enormous, glowing canvases. His paintings of Yosemite and the Rockies, bathed in golden light and often larger than a wall, drew crowds who paid just to see them.

He belonged loosely to the Hudson River School, a group of American landscape painters, but his scenes were bigger and more theatrical than most. Critics later accused him of exaggerating the scale and drama of the land, and his popularity faded as tastes moved toward Impressionism. Even so, his images shaped how a young country pictured its own wild spaces, and they helped build the case for protecting places like Yosemite.