Albert Bierstadt: A Visual Analysis

Albert Bierstadt, whose “gigantic and romantic landscapes…introduced Americans to the awesome beauty of their own frontier,” (Kernan, 86) is a good example of how visual representations played a significant role in the dissemination of the mythic West. Being one of the first artists to join expedition tours, Bierstadt’s paintings of the West offered Americans visual confirmation of what they had been told through literary media as well as their cultural and religious traditions. Because Bierstadt used the sketches, stereoscopic photographs, artifacts, and even stuffed animal heads he had produced and collected during the expedition tours to produce and inspire his paintings, “Americans looked to Bierstadt for information as they would to a
Murdoch for instance describes Remington as an “image-maker…painting what his ever-growing success taught him the public wanted to see” (73) and Dippie describes that it is “hard to think of a western cliché that Remington did not invent, or at least perpetuate.” (What We Talk 269) As Remington’s paintings and illustrations of the West have “broadcasted images far and wide that still, for most people, define the West and the scope of western art,” (Dippie, What We Talk 269) it is safe to assume that Remington and his pictures had been important in shaping the nation’s ‘imagined’ idea of the West. Another interesting fact that also underlines the mythic ‘imagined’ quality of the West is that apart from a “one-year’s residence on a sheep ranch in Kansas, Remington would never live in the West.” (What We Talk 269) Even without spending much time in the West, Remington was able to capture what was believed to be the essence of the West and his pictures eventually came to embody the American West associated with pop culture and the ‘mythic’