Mount Starr King, Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt
Mount Starr King, Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt

Mount Starr King, Yosemite

Mount Starr King, Yosemite c1866 by American Painter Albert Bierstadt (1830 – 1902); was a Prussian born German American who was part of the Hudson River School Movement, known for his lavish sweeping landscapes of the American West.

This is an awe inspiring scene of the grandeur of Mount Starr King in Yosemite National Park; California, United States in the Nevada mountains, as interpreted by Albert Bierstadt in 1866.

The mountains high point is 9,096 feet or 2772 meters above sea level and was named after Thomas Starr King; a Unitarian (believes that the GOD of Christianity is one being versus the other branches of Christianity that believe GOD is one being in three different forms, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.) preacher and political activist.

The painting is set in the valley below with a smooth flowing river moving through mountainous terrain with grass lands and trees on both sides.

On the right bank is a sparse assortment of trees with small boulders protruding through the grass ; and we can see a native American couple with their horse walking along it by a small path.

On the left bank is a denser collection of trees, which may be a thinning out of a forest into an open terrain of grass and a few trees widely space farther away.

The sky is a beautiful eye catching blue filled with large white, blue, light gray and dark gray clouds with sun shining through illuminating the mountain top, the river and the landscape below.

This is a retouched digital art old masters reproduction of a public domain image that is available for purchase as a canvas print online.

Info Below Derived From Wikipedia.org

Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, the son of Christina M. (Tillmans) and Henry Bierstadt, a cooper; his brother was prominent photographer Edward Bierstadt.

Albert was just one year old, when his family immigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1831. Early in his youth he showed a talent and taste for creating clever crayon sketches.

At the age of 21, Albert began to paint in oils and in 1853 he returned to Germany and began studying painting for several years in Düsseldorf; with members of its informal school of painting.

Then in 1857 he returned to New Bedford Massachusetts, where he taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself full-time to painting, and taking several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint scenes of the exploit.

Though other artist had done the same recording the sites of their adventure, Bierstadt was the most prominent painter among them, and remained so for the rest of the 19th century, with imagery like the Sierra Nevada.

In 1858, Bierstadt exhibited a large painting of a Swiss landscape at the National Academy of Design, which gained him positive critical reception and honorary membership in the Academy.

Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River valley. He was part of a group of artists known as the Hudson River School.

In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those western American landscapes for his work.

He returned to a studio he had taken at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York with sketches for numerous paintings he then finished. In 1860, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany.

In 1863, Bierstadt traveled West again, this time in the company of the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he later married. The pair spent seven weeks in the Yosemite Valley.

Throughout the 1860s, Bierstadt used studies from this trip as the source for large-scale paintings for exhibition and he continued to visit the American West throughout his career.

The immense canvases he produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the western American landscape.

Bierstadt’s technical proficiency proficiency (which can be seen in the Sierra Nevada), earned through his study of European landscape, was crucial to his success as a painter of the American West and accounted for his popularity in disseminating views of the Rocky Mountains to those who had not seen them.

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