Born in Germany, Bierstadt was brought to the United States
by his parents when he was only two years old. The family settled
in the whaling center of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he
grew up. Bierstadt was still a young boy when he began drawing
and decided to become an artist. In 1853, he was able to travel
to Düsseldorf using funds he had earned from occasional
jobs teaching drawing in New Bedford. He had hoped to study
at the esteemed Düsseldorf School, but those lessons did
not materialize. Instead, Bierstadt’s American friends,
artists Emanuel Leutze and Worthington Whittredge, became his
informal tutors. Later, Bierstadt, Whittredge, and another American
artist, Sanford Robinson Gifford, painted their way through
the Swiss and Italian Alps.
Wherever he traveled, Bierstadt made oil sketches of the spectacular
scenery, particularly the singular monuments and landmarks that
unfolded before him. During his first trip to the American West,
in 1859, he was amazed to discover that the Rocky Mountains
were similar to his beloved Alps: “The mountains are very
fine. . . . They are of granite formation, the same as the Swiss
mountains and their jagged summits, covered with snow and mingling
with the clouds, presenting a scene which every lover of landscape
would gaze upon with unqualified delight.”
Following this trip Bierstadt moved from Massachusetts to
New York City, taking a studio in the well-known artists’ enclave,
the West Tenth Street Studio Building. He decorated his studio
with Indian artifacts of all kinds, from war bonnets and tomahawks
to animal hides and beaded jewelry. He painted grand spectacles
of the Rocky Mountains for several years, but by the early 1860s
he was ready to discover new subjects. In 1863, after he and
his friends explored the Yosemite region, they traveled to the
magnificent mountains of the Pacific Northwest: Hood, Adams,
Saint Helens, and others. Bierstadt was in heaven. Nor did his
enthusiasm wane after he returned to New York. Eager to transform
his field sketches and photographs into grand oil paintings,
Bierstadt produced so many renditions of California’s
landmarks, especially Yosemite, that he was promoted as its
unofficial artist.
Bierstadt’s final major work, The Last of the Buffalo,
painted in 1889, was the source and symbol of public humiliation
for the artist. By then, his paintings were no longer in style
and his popularity had diminished alarmingly. Bierstadt had
painted the epic struggle between a mounted Indian and massive
buffalo specifically for the prestigious American exhibit at
the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Unfortunately, the
American jurors, mostly younger artists, thought the painting
too large and too old-fashioned to represent America at the
exposition. It was declined.
The Last of the Buffalo can be interpreted on many
levels. The Indian and buffalo struggle in a lonely, remote
region amidst a litter of dead and dying buffalo scattered across
the plains. The outcome will be tragic, regardless of the victor.
More than mere conflict between man and beast, the painting
is a eulogy for the morbidly diminished buffalo herds; for the
Plains Indians, now driven almost entirely onto reservations;
and for the artist himself, once mighty, still courageous, but
now doomed. After this incident, Bierstadt was largely forgotten,
relegated to the obscure passages of art history. When he died,
in 1902, a contemporary artist commented, “I did not know
he was alive until I saw he had died.”
|
