Albert Bierstadt Picture Study Aid and Art Prints
This much we may set down as undeniable, in the history of American landscape art the name of Bierstadt will always be entitled to a position of a certain prominence.
William Howe Downes
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.
Albert Bierstadt Picture Study Aid and Art Prints
I’m excited to announce that I have a new Picture Study Aid covering the art of Albert Bierstadt, along with accompanying fine art prints, now available! Included in this 34-page Picture Study Aid is a summary of the life and artistic inspirations of the German/American Romantic painter Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), key topics for seven of his works (see below), printable versions of the pieces covered in the PDF version, and a brief discussion about Charlotte Mason’s ideas and methods for implementing picture study at different ages.
The pieces discussed are*:
*AmblesideOnline users, please note that these are not all the same pieces as those selected for the AmblesideOnline artist rotation.
You can also find books for further reading about Albert Bierstadt in the Living Art Book Archive.
I include a brief overview of Charlotte Mason picture study at the beginning of the Picture Study Aid; however, I have also written posts here on the blog about why it is important and how we do it in our home and homeschool co-op.
You can get your copy at the link at the end of the post!
Caveats
This guide is by no means an exhaustive analysis or study of each piece, which is intentional. I tried to keep it all very simple in the spirit of there being:
…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.
CHARLOTTE MASONÂ (VOL 6 PG 216)
Instead, this Picture Study Aid is 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.
CHARLOTTE MASONÂ (VOL 6 PG 43)
AmblesideOnline friends, I also have a free Albert Bierstadt Picture Study Aid that follows the AO Artist Study rotation here!
