Albert Bierstamp

To squeeze a Bierstadt painting on a postage stamp is mail fraud. His works ranged over six feet by ten feet, yet he’s been reduced to a one by one-and-a-half inch frame.

Albert Bierstadt painted canvases appropriate to the size of the American West. Founder of the Rocky Mountain School of Painting, his work is criticized for unrealistic lighting. Presumably those critics have never been to the Rocky Mountains, where light does bounce around clouds, off rock faces, a little stream here, a larger pool there, illuminating all kinds of depth in features you never thought possible. Okay, maybe Bierstadt gave the romance of sunset or storm, but I gotta tell ya, those storms are fast and violent and they move over the landscape quickly and dramatically and frequently. And sunsets do occur just about every day. Bierstadt captures the primordial, natural setting, where small detail stands out, even among grand majesty.

Despite his critics, Bierstadt was hugely successful even in his own lifetime. He made twenty-five thousand dollars off one painting. One painting. In the late Eighteen Hundreds! Now he’s offered on a first class stamp for forty-two cents. Talk about your downsizing—sheesh.

You cannot fit the American West on a postage stamp. You have to go there, and if you cannot go, standing before an original Bierstadt painting is a wonderful next-best-thing.