Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt was born near Düsseldorf in 1830 and carried to America as a child, and he made his name selling the American West back to Americans who had never seen it. In 1859 he joined a government survey heading overland, sketching the Rocky Mountains, and he turned the studies into enormous canvases glowing with alpine light, waterfalls, and gathering storms.

These were show pieces. Bierstadt would unveil a single huge painting like a theatrical event, sometimes charging admission, the picture lit dramatically in a darkened room. Works such as The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak sold for tens of thousands of dollars, and the timing was perfect. The transcontinental railroad was being built, and the public was hungry for images of the territory it was about to cross.

Critics later accused him of exaggeration, of pushing the peaks higher and the light more golden than nature allowed, and by the 1880s taste had turned toward the quieter, smaller landscapes coming out of France. When he submitted The Last of the Buffalo to the jury choosing American work for the 1889 Paris Exposition, it was refused. He kept painting but his prices collapsed, and he died in relative obscurity in New York in 1902.