The Heroic Journey of Albert Bierstadt: Artist-Priest of the West

Albert Bierstadt was a handsome, powerful, self-made man who became the highest-paid and most controversial artist in American after the Civil War. He was also a failed hero. At the height of his career in the mid-1860s, he sold 6'x 10'canvasses for up to $30,000, introducing the drama of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite Valley to the world. But he stole a friend's wife, turned his back on his art critics and peers, and became an haute bourgeoisie. So the gods abandoned him, and he lost everything. First the world of art left him, then his beautiful wife contracted tuberculosis. He lost his reputation and income; his house burned, his wife died and then he went bankrupt. When he died nobody remembered him. In the 1960s, however, his work was rediscovered, and now his sketches sell for five and six figures, and large canvasses not already in museums sell for ten and twenty million.