An Art Reel: Albert Bierstadt. Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the westward expansion to paint the scenes. While he was not the first artist to record these bistas, he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century. He became part of the second generation of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started