Leonardo Da Vinci's Influence On The Art World

Numerous artists stand out in history for their famous portraiture. Forever immortalized is Leonardo da Vinci for his painting of a young smiling woman. For their contributions to new and innovative styles and techniques in the field, we remember Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso. However, for all that Rembrandt van Rijn contributed to the art world that now defines the baroque era, American artist Albert Bierstadt’s work defines the majesty and splendor of the natural American west.
Born in Germany on January 7, 1830, Albert’s parents brought him to America at the age of one. At 30, he returned to Düsseldorf to study under Karl Friedrich Lessing and Andreas Achenbach, both landscape painters ("Bierstadt, Albert", Collier's 3: 410). After three
It was on this trip he gathered many sketches of region that he incorporated in his paintings of Yellowstone; these same works later proved highly influential in congress’s decision to pass the Yellowstone Park Bill of 1872, consequently establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in the world (Wikipedia contributors).
Due to her health, Rosalie Bierstadt travelled to the warmer climate of Nassau, Bahamas in 1876 where Albert spent much time with her, even completing several paintings of the region, until her death in 1893 ("Bierstadt, Albert", National Gallery of Art). Within the years after her death, Bierstadt’s work slowly fell out of critical favor until his own death on February 18, 1920. Although his work was largely forgotten until the 1960s, perhaps he enjoyed the best possible life of an artist for in his lifetime he enjoyed much greater fame than most would until after they
Sweeping panoramic vistas and a great attention to detail was the trademark of this style that captivated the imaginations of both Americans and Europeans alike for a majority of the early 1800s. “In style, subject matter, and philosophy, the Hudson River School represented a particularly complimentary mirror of American values in the decades preceding the Civil war.” (Howat 71). Furthermore, art critics observed that “[t]his entire school of landscape-painters is the product of public taste as it existed before the war . . . It is to this . . . aesthetic perception that posterity owes the reproduction of scenes which must ever remain identified with this continent.” (Howat 71). While later criticized for their approach, artists like Bierstadt were uniquely able to exemplify in their paintings the true magnificent splendor of the western world that Americans were thirsting for in those early days of the westward expansion. A critic of his epic Among the Sierra Nevada, California stated that the piece was “a fiction invented from [his] sketches of the West”, however, Bierstadt rightly argued that his work “represented ‘what our scenery ought to be, if it is not so in reality.’” (Among the Sierra