Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

We would like to thank Melissa Webster Speidel, President of the Bierstadt Foundation and Director of the Albert Bierstadt catalogue raisonné project, for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

John K. Howat writes of the present work, "In 1866 Albert Bierstadt built an expansive thirty-five-room mansion at Irvington-on-Hudson, where he lived and worked for the next sixteen years. According to Tuckerman in 1867 'It was because of his conviction that the patient and faithful study of nature is the only adequate school of landscape art, that Bierstadt, like Cole and Church, fixed his abode on the banks of the Hudson. His spacious studio..commands a beautiful and extensive view of the noble river, in the immediate vicinity of the Tappan Zee and Palisades...' This picture, looking west across the Tappan Zee toward a stormy sunset sky, is typical of the artist's grandly conceived pictures." (The Hudson River and Its Painters, New York, 1972, p. 141)