Albert Bierstadt 1830 - 1902

Newhouse Galleries, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Robert W. Lyons, Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above; sold: Parke-Bernet Galleries, January 4, 1945, lot 49)
Newhouse Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1950

New York, Newhouse Galleries, Exhibition of the American Landscape by American Painters, 1820-1870, 1944

This work is in very good condition. It is executed on paper laid down on canvas. Under UV: there are a few scattered dots of inpainting in the sky.
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Albert Bierstadt's dramatic views of the American West earned him broad popularity as one of America's most distinguished artists of the mid-nineteenth century.  Beginning in 1859, he made three trips to the western territories, visiting Yosemite, the High Sierras and Yellowstone, finding inspiration in the magnificent views of the untouched wilderness. The natural splendor of the landscape came to define the artist's most popular works for nearly four decades.

Diligently documenting the sights he witnessed on his journies, Bierstadt painted numerous plein air oil studies of the landscape, emigrant trains, Indians, animals and camp scenes he encountered and used these images to inspire the large-scale canvases he executed later in his studio. An avid enthusiast of new developments in photography, Bierstadt also took stereoscopic photographs of the scenery and its inhabitants, which he later sold with his brother Edward under their "Bierstadt Brothers" partnership.  

Bierstadt wrote from Fort Laramie to his art students back in New Bedford on April 27, 1859, "I could stay here a month and make studies of frontier men, one who told me yesterday of having a 'right smart sickness,' lately.  I shall try and paint, the town is full of men bound for the gold regions and the Hotels are so full that we had to camp out in one of the rooms, the same as we shall do on the prairies" (Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, Painter of the American West, New York, 1974, p. 64.). Two months later he wrote to The Crayon, an art journal back East, "When I am making studies in color, the Indians seem much pleased to look on and see me work; they have an idea that I am some strange medicine-man. They behave very well, never crowding upon me or standing in my way, for many of them do not like to be painted, and fancy that if they stand before me their likenesses will be secured" (Ibid, p. 73).

The Wild West is a dramatic documentation by Bierstadt of a buffalo hunt. While many of Bierstadt's studies were freely executed in thinly applied oil paint and served as spontaneous impressions intended to spark his memory later, the finished background and attention to detail in The Wild West render it a more finished work. As with many of Bierstadt's most successful oil sketches, the present painting is a fresh and immediate record of the artist's surroundings, capturing a moment in time with the intimacy of a diary entry.