Prasenjit Sarkar

Introduction Albert Bierstadt (1830 - 1902), a GermanAmerican painter is known for his large, panoramic and detailed landscapes of the American West. Born in Germany, he migrated to America along with his parents at the age of two. He returned to Germany at the age of 23 to pursue his studies in painting at the Düsseldorf School in Düsseldorf and then returned to America to start his career. He used to return with sketches that finally took shape of large scale landscapes. Most of the subject matters of his work were collected in his journeys the American West, the first of which he undertook in 1859. His favorite subjects were mountains, lakes, glaciers, scenic national parks and wild animals. Bierstadt, along with other artists like Frederic Edwin Church and George Caleb Bingham are said to belong to the Hudson River School, a school of thought that adopted techniques detailing paintings with warm, glowing lights that is often referred to in art circles as luminism. His paintings depict romanticism in his choice of subjects and the use of light and atmospheric elements like clouds and mists. Dramatic visual effects, abrupt contrasts in the use of light and shadow, great details in the foreground and large mountains dominating the background are some of the characteristic signs of a Bierstadt work. Overview of Works of Bierstadt Bierstadt created monumental and literally gigantic representations of the Western landscape and his works are marked by grandiose representations of scenery including landforms and atmospheric effects. One of his first exhibited works was the “The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak”. The painting made a wide appeal to emotions and was dramatic in its rendition of the The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak light and the dark. Painstakingly detailed but not exactly realistic, the subject and the colors were exaggerated and provided an ethereal feeling to the work. His rendition of the American light fired the imagination of the viewers and his paintings were embellished and enhanced by dramatic accentuation of the heights of the mountains. A wonderful example of this style can be found in his work titled “Mountain Brook”, dated 1863 (see cover image). The early works of Bierstadt reveal a spontaneous use of luminous style that makes his pictures enchanting and evokes a poetic mood. A nice example is one of his early sketches titled the “Bombardment of Fort Sumter”. In later days, his canvases became large and he increasingly used raw colors in order to evoke an intense feeling through the largeness of scale. However, even during this time, he painted the “Hetch Hetchie Canyon”, where we can find a magical use of light and a balanced perspective of the atmosphere. Hudson School, Luminism and Bierstadt The Hudson River School, not a formal school but a community of artists with a similar technique and style of rendition, is known for its modeling of lights and luminosity in the images. Most luminist pictures are depictions of landscapes and waterscapes and are characterized by the use of clear colors that have detailed objects modeled by light. They are often organized geometrically and are in the shape of elongated rectangles that have large areas of sky water and land carefully aligned along the edges of the canvas. Unlike the treatment of light in French Impressionism, the treatment of light in the Hudson school style is completely different and contains a deeper perspective and objects are captured in detail using crystal clear light. In essence, this style achieves a sense of calm and conceals all underlying brushwork with a smooth, click finish. The Hudson River School was coined to identify a group of New York City-based landscape painters. The power of their landscape paintings lay in a combination of the painting style and the size of the works. The gigantic sizes of the canvas, especially those of Bierstadt are large and aids in the rendition of a powerful drama on the canvas. Some of his canvases in fact spanned the size of a whole room and most of his images were around six feet by ten feet in size. Albert Bierstadt in fact captured the vast and rustic nature of the American landscape in his monumental landscapes and truly reflects the nature of the lands portrayed as the subjects in his canvas. Bierstadt used very careful brush strokes to express the magnificence of America’s wilderness. Two of his most important paintings from this genre are the “Autumn in the Sierras” and “The Landing of Columbus”. These images in six feet by twelve feet canvases are a reflection of the artist’s initial encounters with the wilderness of The Landing of Columbus the West. Albert Bierstadt and The Hudson River School Bierstadt had a naturalistic style and had mastered the precise handling of the brush that carefully conveyed spiritual and moral change. His works draws inspiration from European Romanticism and his backdrops of mountain peaks, endless valleys and majestic waterfalls transformed his canvases into a theatrical stage. With an emphasis on representation of atmospheric elements like clouds, fog and mist, Bierstadt at times used different colors in order to enhance the feelings of his images. In his images, water was always rendered in ultramarine and grass in a lush green form. For Bierstadt, drama was the main focus of his creations and he used scale, scale of size to bring in the effects. His portrayal of dramatic landscapes continues to be popular till today and is a great study in a journey through the rugged and rustic American west. A Critical Analysis