Albert Bierstadt and the Western Landscape: Sublime Nature in Distress May 22, 2008

Many of the images of Western landscapes that surround us on a daily basis were shaped artistically by Albert Bierstadt, who lived and worked in the latter half of the nineteenth century and who was one of the first artists to travel West repeatedly. This lecture shows how Bierstadt transformed the tradition of depicting Western landscapes as sublime space to a mode of representation that is much more indebted to contemporary European models of landscape painting that frame their images in picturesque ways.