Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-American artist best known for his monumental landscapes that glorified the American West.

Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany and emigrated with his family to New Bedford, Massachusetts at age two. In 1853, Bierstadt traveled to Germany to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. On his return, Bierstadt became part of the second generation of landscape artists associated with the Hudson River School in New York. Bierstadt's travels to Colorado and Wyoming territories in 1859 shifted his artistic focus to the American West. He joined geographical and geological surveys to document scenery. The grand, theatrical vistas he painted of the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and Yosemite Valley brought acclaim and made Bierstadt a financial success, yet also drew criticism when tastes and perspectives shifted.

Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Rhine Province, Prussia, on January 7, 1830. He was the son of Christina M. (Tillmans) and Henry Bierstadt, a cooper. His older brothers were prominent stereo view photographers Edward Bierstadt and Charles Bierstadt. Albert was just a year old when his family emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1831. He made clever crayon sketches in his youth and developed a taste for art.

In 1851, Bierstadt began to paint in oils. He returned to Germany in 1853 and studied painting for several years in Düsseldorf with members of its informal school of painting. After returning to New Bedford in 1857, he taught drawing and painting briefly before devoting himself full-time to painting.

In 1858, Bierstadt exhibited a large painting of a Swiss landscape at the National Academy of Design, which gained him positive critical reception and honorary membership of the Academy. Bierstadt began painting scenes in New England and upstate New York, including in the Hudson River Valley. He was part of a group of artists known as the Hudson River School.

In 1859, Bierstadt traveled westward in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those western American landscapes for his work. He returned to a studio he had taken at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York with sketches for numerous paintings he then finished. In 1860, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design; he received medals in Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Germany.^{[unreliable source?]}

In 1863, Bierstadt traveled west again, this time with the author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose wife he later married. The pair spent seven weeks in the Yosemite Valley. Throughout the 1860s, Bierstadt used studies from this trip as the source for large-scale exhibition paintings and he continued to visit the American West throughout his career. The immense canvases he produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the western American landscape. Bierstadt's technical proficiency, earned through his study of European landscape, was crucial to his success as a painter of the American West and accounted for his popularity in disseminating views of the Rocky Mountains to those who had not seen them.

During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), Bierstadt was drafted in 1863 and paid for a substitute to serve in his place. By 1862, he had completed one Civil War painting Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War based on his brief experiences with soldiers stationed at Camp Cameron in 1861. That painting was based on a stereoscopic photograph taken by his brother Edward Bierstadt, who operated a photography studio at Langley's Tavern in Virginia. The painting received a positive review when it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 1861. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey observed that the painting, created from photographs, "is quintessentially that of a voyeur, privy to the stories and unblemished by the violence and brutality of first-hand combat experience."