The Last of the Buffalo

The Last of the Buffalo: Albert Bierstadt

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Albert Bierstadt Oil Painting - The Last of the Buffalo

Keywords: Buffalo

Work Overview: The Last of the Buffalo
Albert Bierstadt
Date: 1888
Style: Luminism
Genre: genre painting
oil on canvas
overall: 180.3 × 301.63 cm (71 × 118 3/4 in.)

The Last of the Buffalo is Albert Bierstadt's final, great, western painting. Measuring six by ten feet, it mirrors in size his first massive oil, Lake Lucerne (1858), also in the National Gallery of Art collection. The ambitious landscape combines a variety of elements he had sketched during multiple western excursions. Because of its composite nature, the view incorporates many topographical features representative of the Great Plains: the dead and injured buffalo in the foreground occupy a dry, golden meadow; their counterparts cross a wide river in the middle ground; and others graze as far as the eye can see as the landscape turns to prairies, hills, mesas, and snowcapped peaks. Likewise, the fertile landscape nurtures a profusion of plains wildlife, including elk, antelope, fox, rabbits, and even a prairie dog at lower left.

Many of these animals turn to look at the focal group of a man on horseback locked in combat with a charging buffalo. In contrast with his careful record of flora and fauna, the artist's rendering of this confrontation and its backdrop of seemingly limitless herds is a romantic invention rather than an accurate depiction of life on the frontier. By the time Bierstadt painted this canvas, the buffalo was on the verge of extinction. The animals had been reduced in population to only about 1,000 from 30 million at the beginning of the century. Scattering buffalo skulls and other bones around the deadly battle, Bierstadt created what one scholar described as "a masterfully conceived fiction that addressed contemporary issues" - one that references, even laments, the destruction wrought by encroaching settlement. However, at about this time, efforts to preserve the buffalo began to garner support. In 1886, when Smithsonian Institution taxidermist William T. Hornaday traveled west, he was so distraught by the decimation of the buffalo that he became a preservationist. He returned to Washington with specimens for the Smithsonian and also with live buffalo for the National Zoo, which he helped establish in 1889 - one year after Bierstadt completed this painting.

Albert Bierstadt’s painting The Last of the Buffalo gives us a glimpse into the past. During the last half of the nineteenth century, herds of bison that once reached into the millions were nearly exterminated. Bierstadt witnessed these occurrences and, in 1888, painted an allegorical scene to reflect this. In the foreground, thousands of bison roam the plains, symbolizing the past, while the bones of dead bison reflect Bierstadt’s present. Look even closer and notice a fallen Native American, perhaps conveying a message about the plight of Plains Indians at the time.

Bierstadt shows us how the American West changed during his lifetime. The artist was aware of the end of an era in American history, and through this painting, makes his audience think. In a way, the demise of bison herds influenced how the American West was formed and is viewed today.

In 1888, Albert Bierstadt painted The Last of the Buffalo and submitted it to the organizing committee of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. The painting was rejected as not in line with modern art. Today it hangs in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

The Washington Post tried to explain the rejection as Bierstadt’s fault by submitting too late and ran the headline “The Bierstadt Picture: It Was Not Rejected by the Art Loan Exhibition Committee,” on April 1, 1889:
The following extract is from yesterday’s New York World. It is headed “Real American Art:” What manner of “pigmies’” of pigment are these alleged artists who are seeking a notoriety beyond the reach of their daubs by forming ‘committees’ from their petty little selves and then giving wide publication to the fact that they have ‘rejected’ one of Albert Bierstadt’s pictures: the latest bit of this idiotic impertinence was the exclusion from a Loan Exhibition in Washington of a fine canvas which had not been loaned, but actually given, most generously, by Mr. Bierstadt for the benefit of the charity for which the exhibition was held. The only excuse for this amassing impudence furnished by the ‘artists’ in charge was the Mr. Bierstadt “did not belong to their school of art.” This same thin excuse was also given by the learned committee of chromo-tinkers who selected their own nightmares for the Paris Exhibition, insulted Mr. Inness and ‘rejected’ Mr. Bierstadt’s magnificent work, “The Last of the Buffalo.”

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Albert Bierstadt

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