Albert Bierstadt Picture Study

Albert Bierstadt Picture Study Aid

Albert Bierstadt’s name, for those who know it, usually brings to mind epic and vast mountain scenes, waterfalls, behemoth trees, and wild animals. On a personal note, his sweeping, mountainous landscapes inspire a feeling of awe and, in some cases, melancholy because they speak to that ache that John Muir articulated so well when he said the mountains were calling him. His gift for capturing the American West at a time when it was still wild and people of European descent were just beginning to explore it more is evident in the numerous landscape vistas he captured.

Not only did his paintings capture the period in history known as the Western Expansion, but he also personified the American ideal of a “self-made” man. His name is included in the thousands who immigrated to the United States from Germany in the mid-18th century, though he later returned to his homeland to attend the Düsseldorf Academy. Later, he combined his love of adventure and nature with his skill in painting, creating a lucrative business for himself. He often painted subjects because he loved them, but also because he knew they would sell well. At heart, he was an artist, but he was able to harness this passion to amass a considerable fortune.

His popularity declined later in his life as art tastes meandered in other directions, and he was not active during the last few decades of the 19th century. His paintings, however, have recently been attracting attention again, and the legacy he left not only speaks to his talent but also to our enduring fascination with the American West.

The intention of this Albert Bierstadt Picture Study Aid is to equip the home educator with some basic facts and understanding of a sampling of the artist’s work. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece or a complete biography of the artist.

About picture study, Ms. Mason recommended keeping learning as simple as possible, especially in the younger years, and put extra emphasis on the images by themselves.

There is no talk about schools of painting, little about style; consideration of these matters comes in later life, the first and most important thing is to know the pictures themselves. As in a worthy book we leave the author to tell his own tale, so do we trust a picture to tell its tale through the medium the artist gave it. In the region of art as else-where we shut out the middleman. (vol 6 pg 216)

Definite teaching is out of the question; suitable ideas are easily given, and a thoughtful love of Art inspired by simple natural talk over the picture at which the child is looking. (PR Article “Picture Talks”)

…we begin now to understand that art is not to be approached by such an acadamised road. It is of the spirit, and in ways of the spirit must we make our attempt. We recognise that the power of appreciating art and of producing to some extent an interpretation of what one sees is as universal as intelligence, imagination, nay, speech, the power of producing words. But there must be knowledge and, in the first place, not the technical knowledge of how to produce, but some reverent knowledge of what has been produced; that is, children should learn pictures, line by line, group by group, by reading, not books, but pictures themselves. A friendly picture-dealer supplies us with half a dozen beautiful little reproductions of the work of some single artist, term by term. After a short story of the artist’s life and a few sympathetic words about his trees or his skies, his river-paths or his figures, the little pictures are studied one at a time; that is, children learn, not merely to see a picture but to look at it, taking in every detail.” (vol 6 pg 214)

Picture Study Aids are meant to offer basic information about the artists as well as ready answers should your student ask about a particular aspect of a piece and the explanation isn’t readily evident. Ms. Mason emphasized not focusing on strict academic discourse when doing picture study, but rather simply exposing students to the art itself:

His education should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures, pictures by great artists old and new;––…––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he sees. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. (vol 6 pg 43)