Albert Bierstadt 1830 - 1902

Albert Bierstadt's dramatic views of the majestic 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 a spectacular and unspoiled wilderness.  The natural splendor of the landscape and the magnificent views of an unspoiled wilderness came to define the artist's most popular works for nearly four decades.

Bierstadt was not the only artist to make the journey West, but he was the first to fully convey the grandeur of the landscape and to record its infinite variety and ever-changing light.  Diligently documenting the sights he witnessed, Bierstadt would use the images he captured on the trail to inspire the large-scale canvases executed later in his studio. An avid enthusiast of new developments in photography, he consistently took stereoscopic photographs of the scenery and its inhabitants, which he later sold with his brother Edward under their "Bierstadt Brothers" partnership.  He also executed numerous 14 by 19 inch plein air oil studies of the landscape, emigrant trains, Indians, animals and camp scenes he encountered, frequently venturing from his camp on horseback for the day with his color box and sheets of paper which were easier to transport during these excursions. 

While the extant oil studies which survive indicate Bierstadt was chiefly preoccupied with the western landscape, he also managed to obtain a number of studies of the local Indians and animals he observed during his travels, as well as the hardy trappers who had first ventured into the interior depths of the massive mountain ranges.  As he 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." (as quoted in Gordon Hendricks, Albert Bierstadt, Painter of the American West, New York, 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)

Trapper and Indian Guide on Horseback is a rare documentation by Bierstadt of Indians and trappers together, but also an accurate reflection of the cooperative partnership between the two in the early days before the West was settled and before such relationships grew acrimonious.   While many of Bierstadt's studies were freely executed in thinly applied oil color and served as spontaneously recorded impressions intended to spark his memory later, the finished background and attention to detail in Trapper and Indian Guide on Horseback lend it the feel of a more finished work. As with many of Bierstadt's most successful oil sketches, such compositions are a fresh and immediate record of the artist's surroundings; through them the viewer is able to witness what Bierstadt experienced first-hand, capturing a moment in time with the intimacy of a diary entry.