Word: bierstadt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...East grew populous, George Harvey felt that man-made structures like lighthouses enhanced their natural surroundings by emphatically signaling progress. But the prevailing mood changed to awe as Americans pushed westward, and it reached a climax in Albert Bierstadt's enormous canvas of the Rocky Mountains. Almost Wagnerian in scope-soaring peaks, resounding cataracts, blazing shafts of sunlight-it shows nature completely overwhelming insignificant man. On a lesser note, such painters as Jasper Francis Cropsey saw nature as a metaphor for God and respectfully depicted people as tiny objects in glorious settings...
Knights of the Forest. Older painters did it the hard way. Some, like Frederic Remington, rode with the cavalry; others, like Charles Russell, rode the range as cowboys. Each immortalized the West he knew. Albert Bierstadt portrayed the Rockies; George Caleb Bingham the riverboatmen he first knew as a boy on the Missouri. To William Jacob Hays, the buffalo was already a hulking ghost in the dawn of a new day, while James Walker captured another vanishing species, the Spanish vaquero...
...Westward, Ho!" Freebooters, poets and discoverers though many of them were, they rode the rafts with fur traders, saddled up with military expeditions, visually discovered, in the still nomadic Indian tribes, a world adying, and saw in the lonely plains and mountains a new testing ground. Outstanding was Albert Bierstadt, whose monumental views of the Rockies, with their Wagnerian thunder and soaring rainbows , earned him $35,000 a canvas. But so rapidwas the conquest of the continent that even the Bierstadt outlived his epoch. By the time of his death in 1902; artistic concert was already shifting from the grandeur...
...invention into the Fairbanks scale works, made the standard trip to Europe, returning with the usual milky-white copies of classics. Back home, he acquired works by the then-in-vogue Hudson River School painters, built the gallery to house the overflow. Fairbanks' most handsome purchase was Albert Bierstadt's Domes of the Yosemite. The San Francisco Call la mented at the time that the painting "is now doomed to the seclusion of a Ver mont town where it will astonish the na tives." It would have easily astonished sophisticated San Franciscans. Ten feet high and 15 feet...
However stilted, the painting conjures up the ideal of a bygone age, giving to history a heroic sense rather than data processing it. Leutze even persuaded his exacting student Albert Bierstadt, then 24 (later to become one of the chief chroniclers of the Rocky Mountain landscape), to climb a ladder and touch up the bright sky on the left. There was precious little tranquillity that he could add to the blood-and-thunder turbulence of gun smoke...