Sale 043009 Lot 134

ALBERT BIERSTADT
American (1830-1902)
In the Alban Hills
oil on paper on board, signed lower right, painted c. 1856-1857.
19 x 26 1/4

Provenance : Kennedy Galleries, New York; The Eberstat Collection.

Other Notes: After completing his studies in Dusseldorf in the spring of 1857, Albert Bierstadt traveled through Switzerland to Italy. While Bierstadt did not record his travels, he often traveled with Worthington Whittredge or Sanford Gifford who did. According to a Sanford Gifford letter from April 15, 1857, Gifford, Bierstadt, Whittredge, and William H. Beard traveled to the Alban Hills south of Rome to go to a fair at Grottaferrata on March 25, 1857. Bierstadt and Gifford return to the Alban Hills on May 7, after their planned trip to Naples is postponed due to bad weather.

Eleanor Jones Harvey discusses Bierstadt's time in the Alban Hills in her exhibition catalogue, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830-1880. Harvey selected the painting Olevano, 1857 for her discussion. Like In the Alban Hills, Olevano is a well-developed field sketch in oil on paper mounted on canvas measuring 19 x 26 inches. The area around Olevano, a steep hillside town of the Alban Hills about 45 miles east of Rome, was popular with German artists of the Dusseldorf Academy and a natural sketching destination for Bierstadt. In The Alban Hills, 1857, Bierstadt has taken great care to depict the figures of Italians visiting the Etruscan burial caves, in addition to the beautifully detailed rendering of the landscape and clouds.

Albert Bierstadt had returned to New Bedford, Massachusetts by early September and took up painting European subjects through 1858. By October 1857, he already had 4 exhibition-size paintings of Swiss and Italian scenes which he exhibited at John Hopkins' store.

Estimate $ 40,000-60,000