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Albert Bierstadt - painter






Albert Bierstadt was the next prominent artist to influence California landscape imagery, this time in large-scale oil paintings. He came to California and entered Yosemite in the spring of 1863. He already had established himself as a leader in the genre of Western landscape painters and was well known for his exquisite depictions of dramatic light and atmospheric conditions. He had been a part of a government expedition to the Rocky Mountains and had established a national reputation for his painting of those rugged landscapes.

Bierstadt saw Carlton E. Watkins's photographs on exhibit in an art gallery in New York in 1862, and by 1863, was outfitted for the journey into the Yosemite to paint these remarkable vistas. His first expedition into Yosemite was in the company of a group of artists a writer and a scientist, and it was a colorful bohemian adventure. They bought the best horses available in San Francisco, boarded a steam ship to Stockton, and headed into the foothills.

Their first stop was the mariposa grove where they spent a day sketching the trees - which were a difficult subject as it was hard to explain their true enormous size to the viewers of any painting. They then passed through Wawona, and lost heir breath when the trail turned suddenly and they had their first glimpse from Inspiration Point down into the remarkable valley. The writer with the group recorded that the name Inspiration Point "ha appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous expression of our own feelings on the spot …. We did not seem to be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just been breathed." (Fitz Hugh Ludlow). And it was Watkins's photographs that helped them identify the different sights before them - El Capitan, North dome, Half Dome, and Cathedral Rocks. They sketched intently until the sun prepared to set.



Taking the dangerous trail down to the valley floor (in1863 there were no roads into the valley), they set up camp beside the Merced River. "Each morning during their stay in this camp west of Bridalveil Fall, the party rose at dawn, bathed in the icy Merced, breakfasted on game, flapjacks, syrup, apple butter, and coffee, and then started out on horseback" some were out to catch butterflies, some to fish or hunt, and others to sketch and sketch the wonders they beheld.



In the early 1860s there were other tourists in the valley enjoying the views, exercise, and rustic lodge accommodations. The Bierstadt crew kept to their camping plans, and spent their nights at several locations, including Yosemite Falls, Mirror Lake, and Vernal Falls. "Bierstadt was completely under Yosemite's spell - it was to be his favorite painting ground - and within the next eight years he completed at least fifteen oils of Yosemite scenes… critics pronounced him the peer of Fredric E. Church, America's foremost landscapist - perhaps even his superior in mastery of cloud effects and of light and shadow." (M. Sanborn). His largest oil painting of Yosemite was 15 feet long by 9-1/2 feet high - nearly a mural in scale - and one critic proclaimed its depiction of the eastern valley floor and cliffs was "the best landscape every painted in this country."

Albert had fallen in love with a woman who was on the first trip he made to Yosemite, and in 1866 he asked her to marry him. The two returned to Yosemite to paint in 1871. By then one art judge had written that Bierstadt had probably done "more than all written descriptions to give persons abroad an adequate idea of this wonderful gorge … the striking merit of Bierstadt in his treatment of Yosemite, as of other western landscapes, lies in his power of grasping distances, handling wide spaces, truthfully massing huge objects, and realizing splendid atmospheric effects." And other judges obviously agreed as he won numerous international prizes for his western landscapes.

Bierstadt and his new wife then returned to their eastern home where he spent many years painting the oils that followed the sketches and watercolors he had made live in the California backcountry. He visited California one more time, this time to paint Mount Shasta and Monterey, and once again visited the powerful Yosemite in 1880.