Albert Bierstadt was born in Solingen, Germany, in 1830. When he was two years old his family emigrated to the United States and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He received his early education in that New England community, all the while showing increasing talent for drawing and painting. In 1853 he returned to Europe to undertake serious art instruction at the renowned Dsseldorf Academy. Three years later he went on to Rome, where he spent the winter and spring of 1856-57 sketching and painting with his friend, the American landscapist, Worthington Whittredge. He returned to New Bedford the following summer.

In April 1859 Bierstadt was one of several artists and photographers who joined Colonel Frederick Lander's expedition to find a suitable rail route from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast. An unforgettable experience for him, it would be the first of many such treks the artist would take to the then vast, largely uncharted, and sparsely settled American West. That first-hand witness to the frontier provided a principal source of subject matter for the remainder of Bierstadt's life. In fact it was 1864, the year following his second western journey, that he painted the Hunter Museum's fine oil, Across the Prairie, which depicts an autumn scene on the Great Plains. To the left of the picture, cottonwood trees rise above the bank of a tranquil stream that winds forward from the center rear depth. A warm light pervades the entire vista as a setting sun near the middle of the composition glows golden through the diffusion of clouds. The sky seems particularly large and the distances great owing in part to the low horizon line. Delicate touches of paint dot the foreground and represent grasses and flowers.

Bierstadt's work is closely allied to the style of the Hudson River School (a designation coined by the nineteenth-century art critic for the New York Tribune, Clarence Cook), a group of artists who sought to express in their painting the beauty and magnificence of landscape. The School's views reflect those of the American transcendentalist philosophers who glorified nature as a manifestation of God and a providential gift to humankind. Bierstadt was an important figure in the School's third and final generation; it was rather a sensationalist phase whereby colossal scale and grandiloquent depictions overwhelm the viewer. Bierstadt's large theatrical canvasses of the period do indeed impart a certain awesome grandeur. But it is in his smaller work and oil sketches that the artist's accomplishment can be best seen. Writing in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Art and Life in America in 1960, Oliver Larkin declares: "From time to time the freshness and immediacy of his early work reappeared in small-scaled landscapes which now seem the true measure of his talent."

The more intimate pieces, such as Across the Prairie, possess a directness of vision and sense of spontaneity lacking in the labored large paintings. Nonetheless those outsized works were in popular demand by the wealthy of their day. At the height of his career Bierstadt was able to command $25,000 a canvas, then the highest sum ever paid for American painting. He lived in baronial splendor above the banks of the Hudson at Irvington. When his home was destroyed by fire in 1881, he and his wife moved to New York City. By the 1880s the artist's fame was eclipsed by his patrons' new fascination with European art, and particularly the style of impressionism. Since the 1970s Bierstadt has been critically re-accorded the credit he deserves as a major figure in nineteenth-century American art.