Born on April 10, 1819, in Brede, Denmark, Joachim Ferdinand Richardt went on to become a favored artist of European and American aristocracy during his lifetime. He was most celebrated for his monumental views of Niagara Falls, and still is today. In 1835, at age sixteen, Richardt enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, where he took lessons from Bertel Thorvaldsen, Gustav Hetsch and J.L. Lund. Early in his career he  received support from the Danish Crown, which enabled him to travel and make sketches of the Danish landscape and its castles. He established a reputation as a premier artist of the region by making important sales to King Christian VII of Denmark, the Russian Czar and members of the British Monarchy. Beginning in 1844 he created a series of lithographs of Danish and Swedish manor houses that received wide acclaim. In 1855, Richardt departed for America for the first time, reputedly at the invitation of William Vanderbilt. It is thought that Mr. Vanderbilt commissioned Richardt to paint a view of  Niagara Falls for $14,000. Richardt remained in the states for four years, the trip yielded over one-hundred paintings, thirty-two of which were monumental views of the falls. He also painted views of Philadelphia, Natural Bridge in Virginia, the Mississippi River, and some of the first paintings of Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, which at the time had not been done before. By 1860 Richardt was back in Copenhagen exhibiting his works produced while abroad. During this decade he got married, exhibited annually at Denmark’s Charlottenberg Salon, and produced a large number of city views of Stockholm and Copenhagen. In 1873 Richardt and his family immigrated to the United States. On their way to their final destination of San Francisco, they stopped for a year and a half in Niagara so that Richardt could produce more of his renowned paintings of the falls. By 1875 Richardt was in San Francisco, and in 1876 he moved across the bay to Oakland, where he lived for the rest of his life. During the last two decades of his life, he focused primarily on marine views, the redwood groves of California, and he even made a trip to Yosemite Valley. He spent the 1880s regularly exhibiting in the San Francisco area. Ferdinand Richardt died on October 29, 1895 in Oakland, California. Today his works are represented in collections across the country, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The White House, and The U.S. Department of State.