Jun 13, 2019 - Sale 2513

Sale 2513 - Lot 1

Price Realized: $ 22,500
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
ALBERT BIERSTADT
Rocky Mountain Landscape.

Oil on paper mounted on board. 350x480 mm; 14x19 inches. Signed in oil, lower right recto.

Ex-collection private collection, New Jersey.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming Albert Bierstadt catalogue raisonné in preparation under the direction of Melissa Speidel.

Bierstadt (1830-1902) was the foremost American painter of western scenes during the second half of the 19th century. Born in Germany, he emigrated with his family at an early age to the United States and, after training in Germany and Massachusetts, devoted himself to painting by the late 1850s. During his fruitful career, he joined several surveying journeys to the American west. The luminous, sweeping landscape paintings he created from these trips, rivaled only by his contemporary Thomas Moran (1837-1927), brought him significant acclaim (one of his Rocky Mountain paintings, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was sold in 1865 for the then hefty sum of $25,000—around $365,000 today) and thereby helped to contribute to American Westward Expansion.