The Last of the Buffalo

Bierstadt completed The Last of the Buffalo in 1888, near the end of a career defined by heroic celebration of the American wilderness. By this point, the artist had witnessed the near-total extermination of the plains bison, whose population had collapsed from an estimated thirty million animals to fewer than a thousand. Rather than painting a memorial elegy, Bierstadt staged the scene as an active confrontation, presenting the hunt as both a living cultural practice and an implicit indictment of industrial-era destruction. He submitted the painting to represent the United States at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, but the selection committee of the American fine arts jury rejected it, a slight that wounded Bierstadt publicly. The work was eventually purchased by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and it now resides in the permanent collection of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Historically, the painting stands at the intersection of Hudson River School luminism and the emerging documentary impulse of the late 19th century: Bierstadt uses the full vocabulary of Romanticism's sublime, dramatic scale and theatrical light, in service of a subject that was plainly ecological and political. The speed at which the frontier had closed between his first trip West in 1859 and the completion of this canvas lends the work its peculiar tension, grandeur held in the same breath as grief.