This ready to hang, gallery-wrapped art piece features a river with mountains in the background. Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 - February 18, 1902) was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century. Bierstadt was part of the Hudson River School, not an institution but rather an informal group of like-minded painters. The Hudson River School style involved carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran, is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School. Giclee (jee-clay) is an advanced printmaking process for creating high quality fine art reproductions. The attainable excellence that Giclee printmaking affords makes the reproduction virtually indistinguishable from the original piece. The result is wide acceptance of Giclee by galleries, museums, and private collectors. Gallery wrap is a method of stretching an artist's canvas so that the canvas wraps around the sides and is secured a hidden, wooden frame. This method of stretching and preparing a canvas allows for a frameless presentation of the finished painting.