Born in Germany,Jean Bierstadt emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1832. Albert Bierstadt was the first artist to take as his subject the vastness of the mountains of western North America. After his early paintings were exhibited in Boston, he traveled to Germany to study painting for three years at the Dusseldorf Akademie.He returned to the United States and painted throughout the northeastand the West. From sketches and oil studies done from nature, he painted landscape paintings in his New York studio the huge, carefully detailed panoramic views of Western scenery that made him one of America's most admired painters in the 1860s and '70s