10 min read
Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) earned the highest price paid for an American painting in the 19th century when The Last of the Buffalo sold for $50,000 around 1889. Thirteen years later he died in New York, bankrupt and out of fashion, his name nearly erased from American art.
Picture the gap between those two facts. A man who once charged admission to see a single canvas, who sold paintings to railroad barons and European nobility, whose Rocky Mountain panoramas made audiences gasp behind velvet ropes, spent his final decade unable to find buyers at any price. The fall was not gradual. It was a collapse, and Bierstadt watched it happen while he was still alive to feel it.
$50,000 in 1889: The Price That Crowned Him
The number deserves context. When The Last of the Buffalo, one of two monumental buffalo scenes Bierstadt painted in 1888 and 1889, changed hands for $50,000, art historian Peter H. Hassrick called it the highest price ever paid for an American piece of art in the 19th century. That painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
It was not even his first record. In 1865, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sold to the English collector James McHenry for $25,000, an almost unthinkable sum for a living American artist. Bierstadt had built a machine for producing money as much as paintings. He unveiled his great canvases as single-picture spectacles, lit theatrically, promoted in newspapers, toured city to city with paid admission. The showmanship recalls how J.M.W. Turner staged his own atmospheric drama decades earlier; readers who enjoy that lineage of theatrical landscape painting can follow it in our story of Turner's moonlit view of Alnwick Castle, painted long before the castle became Hogwarts on film.
The thunder of that commercial instinct is audible in Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm of 1869, where a darkening sky presses down on a herd crossing open ground. It compresses the same subject that would later earn his record price into a tighter, more ominous statement, painted twenty years before The Last of the Buffalo when the herds were already vanishing.
Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm, Albert Bierstadt, 1869. View print options
Solingen to Düsseldorf: The Making of a Showman
Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830 and crossed the Atlantic as an infant when his family settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He showed little early promise. No prodigy stories, little family encouragement, just a young man staging picture shows at a New Bedford concert hall with a Drummond limelight that dissolved one image into the next. The instinct for spectacle came before the skill.
The skill arrived in Düsseldorf. In 1853 he returned to Germany and trained in the orbit of the Royal Academy alongside Emanuel Leutze and Worthington Whittredge, absorbing the Düsseldorf school's discipline: precise drawing, controlled composition, obsessive detail. German Romantic landscape painting shaped everything he did afterward, the same tradition explored in our article on the Norwegian painter J.C. Dahl, who made his moonlit view of Dresden while sharing a house with Caspar David Friedrich.
Two early works bracket this European apprenticeship. Lake Lucerne of 1858, now in the National Gallery of Art, was the vast Swiss panorama that announced his ambition when he showed it in America; it proved he could organize an enormous field of alpine detail into a single breathing view.
Lake Lucerne, Albert Bierstadt, 1858. View print options
The Italian journeys with Gifford and Whittredge left their own residue. The Marina Piccola, Capri shows Bierstadt working the picturesque Old World vein, sunlit Mediterranean coast instead of granite peaks, and it reminds us he could have had a comfortable career painting Europe. He chose the West instead.
The Marina Piccola, Capri, Albert Bierstadt. View print options
1859 to 1869: The Decade the West Made Him Rich
In 1859 Bierstadt joined Frederick Lander's survey expedition westward, sketching and photographing as he went. He was among the first American artists to use a camera to record landscape views, then translated those field studies into studio canvases of staggering scale back East. The formula held for a decade: travel light, sketch fast, paint big, sell high.
Not everything was enormous. Mountain Brook of 1863 is the quiet counterargument, an intimate forest interior built around a mass of pink-granite boulders, with pale birch trunks catching the light and a thin waterfall slipping down the right-hand rocks. Look closely and a tiny bird perches on the fallen log that bridges the boulders at the center, the kind of precise, easily missed detail his Düsseldorf training made possible. Collectors who find the epic canvases overwhelming often respond to this one first; it carries his precision without demanding an entire wall.
Mountain Brook, Albert Bierstadt, 1863. View print options
The decade peaked with Among the Sierra Nevada, California, painted in Rome in 1868 and toured through European capitals before crossing back to America. Its meaning is often misread as documentary. It is nothing of the kind. The painting is a composite, an idealized Eden assembled from sketches and memory, sunlight breaking over an alpine lake that exists nowhere on any map. That was the point: Bierstadt sold the promise of the West, not its geography. The original hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Among the Sierra Nevada, California, Albert Bierstadt, 1868. View print options
Yosemite gave him his most bankable subject. Mount Starr King, Yosemite of 1866 belongs to the run of valley pictures that made Yosemite a national obsession years before it became a national park, and it shows the golden atmospheric light that separated Bierstadt from every rival, including Thomas Moran. Moran claimed Yellowstone; Bierstadt got there first with Yosemite, and with more money.
Mount Starr King, Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt, 1866. View print options
Paris, 1889: The Rejection That Signaled the End
Then the ground shifted. In 1889 the American selection committee for the Exposition Universelle in Paris rejected The Last of the Buffalo. The painting that commanded the century's record price was judged too old-fashioned to represent American art abroad. The humiliation was public and precise.
Two forces killed his market. Impressionism replaced the tight Düsseldorf finish with broken color and modern subjects, and critics began treating Bierstadt's operatic grandeur as vulgar theater. At the same time, transcontinental rail travel let ordinary Americans see the West with their own eyes, and it looked nothing like his amber-lit Eden. The public felt, in a sense, deceived. Art history is full of such collisions between an image and an uncomfortable truth; Géricault faced the inverse problem, a painting too honest for its government, which we trace in our account of The Raft of the Medusa, the government cover-up the French state tried to bury.
Bierstadt kept painting as if nothing had changed. California Spring of 1875 already shows him doubling down on pastoral serenity, cattle grazing under towering clouds, exactly as taste was turning against him. Seen today, freed from the quarrels of the 1880s, it reads as one of his most peaceful and confident pictures.
California Spring, Albert Bierstadt, 1875. View print options
Fire, Bankruptcy, and a Quiet Death in 1902
Misfortune compounded the market's verdict. In 1882 his grand studio home at Irvington-on-Hudson burned, taking paintings and sketches with it. Sales dwindled through the late 1880s. In 1895 Bierstadt declared bankruptcy. The man who had earned $50,000 for a single canvas could no longer cover his debts.
He died in New York on 18 February 1902, at 72. The obituaries were brief. Within a generation his name had fallen, as one account puts it, out of favor and very nearly out of memory. It is worth pausing on how strange that is. No scandal ruined him, no crime, no lost skill. Taste simply moved, and it moved fast enough to bury a living man.
The Revival: How Museums Rehabilitated Bierstadt
Rehabilitation took six decades. In the 1960s art historians began reevaluating the Hudson River School and its western wing, and Bierstadt's reputation climbed with it. The turning point came in the early 1990s with a major exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum that traveled to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. More recently, the exhibition "Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West" appeared at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. "He's remembered much more fondly than he has been over past generations," Hassrick observes.
For anyone wondering where to see Albert Bierstadt paintings today, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art hold the anchors of his career. And for homes, his range is wider than the mountain epics suggest. The shadowed forest interior of Mountain Brook sits comfortably beside the moody scholarship of our dark academia art prints collection, while Among the Sierra Nevada and Mount Starr King, Yosemite want breathing room and daylight. If the buffalo pictures moved you, Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm belongs in the same room as this story: it is the record-price subject in its rawest early form, painted while the herds still existed to mourn.
Albert Bierstadt's originals are under museum glass. Yours can be on your wall this week.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What was the highest price paid for an Albert Bierstadt painting in his lifetime?
The Last of the Buffalo, painted in 1888-89, sold for $50,000, which art historian Peter H. Hassrick describes as the highest price paid for an American piece of art in the 19th century. Earlier, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak sold for $25,000 in 1865.
Where can you see Albert Bierstadt's original paintings today?
Among the Sierra Nevada, California hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and The Last of the Buffalo and Lake Lucerne are at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Why did Albert Bierstadt fall out of fashion?
Public taste shifted from Romanticism toward Impressionism in the 1880s, and transcontinental rail travel showed Americans that the real West looked nothing like his idealized scenes. In 1889 the American committee for the Paris Exposition rejected The Last of the Buffalo, and by 1895 he was bankrupt.
What does Among the Sierra Nevada, California actually depict?
It is a composite, idealized vision rather than a real location. Bierstadt painted it in Rome in 1868 from sketches and memory, assembling peaks, lake, and light into an Eden-like image of the American West designed to astonish European and American audiences.
How did Bierstadt work, and was he part of the Hudson River School?
He is considered the leading western painter of the Hudson River School's second generation. Trained in Düsseldorf, he sketched and photographed on western expeditions, among the first artists to use a camera for landscape views, then built monumental canvases in his studio.
Eleanor Hart
Eleanor Hart writes about European painting for Symbol Art Gallery. She chases the small stories behind big landscapes, and still thinks one brushstroke can change a room.
