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 in the Academy.
[4]
 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. [5] 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.[6][unreliable source?]
In 1863, Bierstadt traveled West again, this time in the company of 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 paintings for exhibition and
he continued to visit the American West throughout his career. [7] The immense canvases he
produced after his trips with Lander and Ludlow established him as the preeminent painter of the
western American landscape.[8] 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.[8]
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. [9] 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." [9]