Albert Bierstadt

Alaska, about 1889

oil on canvas

14 x 20 in.

Gift of Mrs. Addison Bybee

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Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, Albert Bierstadt came to New Bedford, Massachusetts with his family when he was a baby. He returned to Düsseldorf in 1853 to study at the Royal Academy.  While in Germany he traveled throughout Europe with fellow students Sanford Gifford and Worthington Whittredge.  Bierstadt returned to America in 1857 and a year later he began painting the Rocky Mountains, a subject he would return to often.  He made numerous trips to the West painting and exhibiting in California.  In 1865 he built a home on the Hudson River near New York City, but his fame lies in his landscapes of the American West.  Soon after the United States occupied the Alaska territory many artists, including Bierstadt, painted in the area.  In 1889, Bierstadt traveled to Alaska on the steamer Ancon.  The Ancon was wrecked and Bierstadt, along with the other passengers, stayed in Indian huts and salmon canneries for five days until the next steamer brought them back to Vancouver.  During that time, Bierstadt created sixty studies and two books of drawings of Alaska.

Alaska was probably done in the artist’s studio from sketches made during his ill-fated voyage on board the Ancon.  The artist’s subject is the vast scale and awe-inspiring, almost spiritual qualities of fog-shrouded mountains and wilderness.  The group of Indian hunters and the dark forest add to the scene’s mystery and must have suggested to nineteenth-century viewers a place on the edge of their imagination.  The canvas expresses Bierstadt’s sense of awe before the vast untamed wilderness created by God as a sign of His divine presence in the blessing of the New World.

Reference

Nancy K. Anderson and Linda S. Ferber.  Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise, Manchester, Vermont: Hudson Hills Press, 1991. ISBN-13: 978-1555950590