Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt was born in Germany in 1830, grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and went back to Düsseldorf to learn to paint. Then he went west. He travelled with a government survey party in 1859, camped in Yosemite Valley in 1863, and for the next decade his enormous canvases were how most Americans first saw the Sierra Nevada. This Bierstadt wall art is three of those California paintings, framed or on canvas, made to order in our shop in the USA.

The Three Paintings

Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1866), at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the sheer granite wall of the valley over a still, bright river, painted in his New York studio from the sketches he made on that 1863 trip.

Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868), at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The original is ten feet wide: a mountain lake, a waterfall, deer at the shore, and light breaking through cloud over the peaks.

Sierra Nevada, from his years living in California in the early 1870s, now at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina — another lake, another family of deer, snow on the summits.

What You Are Looking At

These are not survey drawings. Bierstadt combined sketches from different places into views grander than any single spot, with the mountains a little taller and the light a little more golden than life. Critics complained about it at the time. Buyers did not, and that heightened light is what makes the paintings work on a wall.

Choosing For The Room

Bierstadt belongs in a den, a cabin, a lodge-style great room or an office — anywhere wood and leather already are. The light in all three is late-afternoon gold, so they warm a room that faces north. They are also the obvious gift for somebody just back from Yosemite, or who grew up in the West and lives somewhere flat now.

Framed Or Canvas

Framed prints come in four frame colors — Barnwood, Charcoal, Black, and Walnut — with an easel back, so the smaller sizes can stand on a shelf as well as hang. Canvas is a 1-inch gallery wrap that hangs without nails or tools, with a floating frame as the upgrade for a more finished edge. Everything is printed and finished to order in our family-owned shop in the USA. Barnwood and Walnut suit these landscapes best.