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Bierstadt's European apprenticeship served him well the following spring when he journeyed west for the first time, joining Frederick W. Lander's survey party bound for the Rocky Mountains. Though not the first artist to see or even paint the Rockies, Bierstadt was the first who brought with him superior technical skills and considerable experience painting European alpine peaks. For Americans eager to finally see the mountains a generation of travelers had described as "America's alps," Bierstadt's credentials were near perfect.
By late September 1859 Bierstadt had returned to New Bedford laden with field sketches, stereo photographs, and Indian artifacts. Within three months he had moved to New York, established himself in the Tenth Street Studio Building, and begun to exhibit the western paintings that would soon make his reputation. He completed the most important of these, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak (Metropolitan Museum, New York), in the spring of 1863 just weeks before he set off on his second journey west.
Accompanied by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a celebrated writer who later published a book about their overland adventure, Bierstadt traveled to the Pacific Coast. He spent several weeks in Yosemite Valley completing the plein air studies he would later use to compose several of his most important paintings. Following a trip north through Oregon to the Columbia River, Bierstadt and Ludlow returned east. Utilizing studies gathered during all stages of his journey, Bierstadt completed, by the end of the decade, a remarkable series of large scale paintings that not only secured his position as the premier painter of the western American landscape but also offered a war-torn nation a golden image of their own Promised Land.
In 1867 Bierstadt and his bride set sail for London. It was a triumphant return for the emigrant's son who had arrived in Europe fourteen years earlier an eager but impoverished student. Six months after his arrival Bierstadt was invited to exhibit two of his most important paintings (both of which had been purchased by English railroad entrepreneurs), privately before Queen Victoria. During the more than two years he remained abroad, Bierstadt traveled, sketched, and cultivated the friendships that would sustain a European market for his work for many years.
In July 1871, Bierstadt and his wife boarded the recently completed transcontinental railroad bound for San Francisco. Apart from the artist's brief return to New York that autumn, they remained in California until October 1873. As he had since his days in Dusseldorf, Bierstadt spent much of his time traveling in remote regions completing the field studies he would later use to compose studio paintings. |