Last of the Buffalo

The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo places a violent encounter inside an apparently inexhaustible world. A mounted Indigenous hunter and a charging bison confront each other just beyond a foreground strewn with bodies and bones. Behind them, living animals fill the river valley almost to the horizon. Painted in 1888–1889, when American bison had already been driven close to extinction, this imagined abundance gives the title a troubling force: the picture makes visible the life that could disappear.^[1]

The painting discussed and pictured here belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. It is oil on canvas, measuring 180.3 × 301.63 cm, and entered the Corcoran Gallery of Art as a gift from Mary Stewart Bierstadt, the artist’s widow, in 1909. It is now part of the National Gallery’s Corcoran Collection, accession number 2014.79.5. A second, smaller version belongs to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. Their shared title has sometimes obscured important differences in their making, ownership and conservation.^[1][2]

Annotated Details from The Last of the Buffalo

Use the numbered details to explore how Bierstadt builds this scene from light, scale and overlapping forms. Image: National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Mary Stewart Bierstadt [Mrs. Albert Bierstadt], 1909). Image source.

Details from THE LAST OF THE BUFFALO

Compare these enlarged passages with their positions in the full painting.

1

The rider and the buffalo

Follow the crossing directions of the horse, rider and buffalo. The compressed encounter gives the foreground a force that contrasts with the open plain.

2

Bones in the foreground

Look for the pale bones against the earth. These still forms contrast with the living animals elsewhere in the picture.

3

The distant herd

Compare the small animals across the plain with the large foreground buffalo. Repeated silhouettes carry the scene into the distance.

A hunt poised between life and death

The white horse catches the eye first. Its pale body stands out against the brown mass of the charging bison; its raised forelegs and open mouth give the central encounter a sudden upward force. The rider bends backwards and extends his arm along a feathered lance. Rather than showing a hunter safely pursuing fleeing prey, Bierstadt turns the bison towards the horse. Art historian Lisa Strong describes the encounter as a moment of reciprocal injury, with the lance striking the bison as the animal gores the horse. The diagonal running through rider, weapon, horse and bison binds them into one unstable group.^[2]

Other hunters enter from the right, carrying the action across the canvas. Yet the painting does not let their movement sweep everything before it. At the left, a standing bison faces almost directly towards us. Its stillness interrupts the chase. In the immediate foreground, large dark animals lie close enough for their heavy bodies to dominate the lower edge of the picture. A fallen person and a pale horse are partly concealed among them. The eye moves between this compressed tangle and the isolated skulls scattered across the open earth.^[1]

The bones give the scene a longer timescale than the instant of combat. Some animals are dying now; others have been dead long enough to leave bleached remains. The river beyond carries a different rhythm. Bison gather at its banks and wade through the water, while the distant herd becomes a fine pattern of dark marks across the plain. A prairie dog at the lower left and other smaller animals add life around the confrontation. The broad blue sky and golden ground make the valley inviting even as the foreground makes it terrible.

Bierstadt constructed this landscape from elements gathered during different western journeys. River, meadow, mesas and distant snowy peaks form a composite panorama rather than the record of one identifiable hunting site. Its wealth of animal detail does not turn it into documentary evidence of a particular event. The National Gallery describes the hunt and seemingly limitless herd as a romantic invention.^[1] The invention matters because it brings violence and abundance into the same field of vision: the world appears capable of sustaining the animals, while the action threatens to empty it.

What does “the last” mean?

The title cannot mean that the foreground animal is literally the final surviving bison. The herd behind it is too extensive for that reading. Instead, the painting imagines the scale of a threatened loss. Strong explains that Bierstadt’s picture participates in the contemporary movement for bison preservation, bringing the species back before the viewer in paint at a moment when its survival was uncertain. She draws on Nancy Anderson’s interpretation that the work attempts to restore the animals to the present, rather than simply mourn a distant past.^[2]

The choice of hunters creates a difficulty that a modern reader should keep in view. Indigenous people occupy the visible scene of killing, but the devastation of bison populations belonged to the much larger history of commercial slaughter and expanding settlement. Peter H. Hassrick, writing for the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, places Bierstadt’s painting in the context of the hide hunters of the 1870s and the confinement of Native peoples to reservations. Reading the pictured hunt as an explanation of near-extinction would mistake the artist’s symbolic drama for its historical causes.^[3]

The National Park Service identifies railways, rifles and the international market for hides among the principal mechanisms of the decline. It also describes the destruction of buffalo as a means of controlling Native peoples.^[4] Those forces are absent from the canvas: there is no railway, hide yard or commercial hunter. The visible act of killing therefore cannot carry the whole explanation. The painting's sympathy for a threatened animal needs to be read alongside what it leaves out.

Hassrick interprets the bison as a counterpart to the Plains peoples whose lives depended on them. In his account, Bierstadt used the intertwined fates of people and animals to address a changing West, and the two monumental versions grew out of that concern. He also connects their making with Bierstadt’s visits to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West troupe on Staten Island in 1888, where the painter could study bison and Native performers.^[3]

That interpretation helps explain the fallen hunter as well as the wounded animals. It also exposes the limits of the image. The main rider is a heroic figure arranged for a grand pictorial tragedy; his body, pose and relationship to the horse serve the composition. Strong relates the group to earlier western hunting pictures and to the ordered profile figures of a classical frieze. She identifies John Mix Stanley’s Buffalo Hunt on the Southwestern Prairies as a possible precedent.^[2] Bierstadt’s picture can express sympathy while presenting Indigenous people through a theatrical vision of disappearance. Their predicament reaches the viewer through his constructed drama.

Hunting, protection and the conservation movement

Bierstadt had a concrete connection with organised conservation. The Boone and Crockett Club's historical timeline names him among the men involved in its founding in 1887, alongside Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell.^[5] This places him within a developing institutional effort, as well as within the history of paintings interpreted as appeals for bison preservation.

That connection did not require hunting and protection to be opposites. The National Gallery's account of Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm quotes an 1859 letter in which Bierstadt considers exchanging his rifle for his sketchbook while watching a buffalo cross a river.^[6] The episode describes looking and hunting within the same encounter. It gives a more complicated background to The Last of the Buffalo than an assumption that admiration for wildlife always meant refusing to kill it.

The National Park Service's history traces early rescue efforts to people who captured and sheltered bison in the late 1860s. It also distinguishes later protection in Yellowstone and the formation of the American Bison Society in 1905.^[4] Survival depended on actions involving living animals, land and enforcement. Bierstadt's picture belongs to the culture in which protection became a pressing concern; its presence in that culture does not establish that one canvas caused a particular law or a herd's recovery.

From a quiet crossing to a foreground catastrophe

The earlier Buffalo Trail: The Impending Storm, dated 1869 by the National Gallery, helps clarify how much Bierstadt changed the pictorial role of the animals.^[6] There, a short line of buffalo crosses shining water beneath an immense cloud bank. The nearest animal has weight and individuality, but the procession quickly diminishes into shadow. Trees and weather command most of the view. The buffalo furnish a living scale for the landscape.

In The Last of the Buffalo, the bodies press towards us. Dark foreheads, curved horns, reddish coats and the pale bones on the ground give the lower part of the canvas a physical density that the earlier crossing lacks. The two nearest fallen animals almost block our imagined path into the scene. At the same time, the winding river draws the eye around the confrontation and deep into the occupied valley.

The sky reverses the expected distribution of danger. Buffalo Trail suspends its threat above living animals; The Last of the Buffalo sets its violent struggle beneath a comparatively gentle blue expanse. Warm light describes the horse, the charging bison and the grass without making the struggle benign. The catastrophe has moved into the foreground, where a viewer must confront it directly.

These are different compositions, rather than consecutive episodes in a recorded hunt. Their comparison shows Bierstadt making wildlife carry different kinds of narrative: a measured passage through uncertain weather in one, and a drama of mortality within continuing abundance in the other.

Two versions, an unsettled sequence

The National Gallery canvas is the larger of the two major versions. In the Cody painting, individual forms are smaller and the space between them is more compressed. Conservators Dare Myers Hartwell and Helen Mar Parkin found that this difference was integral to the design: the smaller painting was not simply a large canvas cut down to its present size. They also noted local changes, including animals at the right centre that run in the Cody picture but have fallen in the former Corcoran version.^[7]

The relationship goes deeper than visible differences. Technical examination found revisions beneath both paintings, including an antelope near the standing bison at the left and a large mounted archer between the central horse and the herd at the right. These earlier forms survive as pentimenti: traces of decisions Bierstadt subsequently changed. Their altered scale shows him moving figures backwards and forwards in pictorial space while trying to connect the foreground drama with the distant animals.^[7]

Because related revisions occur in both canvases, the evidence resists a simple sequence of finished original followed by faithful copy. Strong describes work on the two paintings as concurrent. Hartwell and Parkin proposed that Bierstadt may have begun the Cody version, moved to a larger canvas to improve the spatial relationships, and later returned to complete the smaller one. The exact order remains a hypothesis. A newspaper account reported that Bierstadt called the smaller work a study, but that description alone cannot settle how he alternated between the canvases.^[2][7]

Ownership also distinguishes them. The British mining magnate John Thomas North was long thought to have owned the painting that became the Corcoran’s. Strong reports that an illustrated catalogue of his estate sale in 1898 instead identifies the Cody version. The National Gallery painting followed a separate path and was given to the Corcoran by Mary Bierstadt in 1909.^[2]

Rejected for the Exposition, accepted at the Salon

Bierstadt unveiled the painting at New York’s Union League Club in January 1889 before submitting it for the American section of the Paris Exposition Universelle. The American selection committee rejected it. According to Strong’s examination of the contemporary dispute, its size was one stated objection; the committee also questioned whether it represented the artist suitably. The verdict provoked press accusations of jealousy and snobbery.^[2]

The disagreement reflected changing taste. Bierstadt’s expansive, carefully detailed landscape and emphatic action stood apart from the smaller, more suggestive paintings associated with the younger committee members and French Barbizon influence. Strong reads the painting’s scale and finish as a late assertion of an artistic language that Bierstadt’s critics considered outmoded.^[2]

The rejection did not prevent a Paris showing. Bierstadt submitted the work to the Salon, where his Legion of Honor status entitled him to automatic acceptance. The National Gallery records its exhibition there in May–June 1889 under the title Chasse aux bisons. The American Exposition committee’s rejection and the Salon’s acceptance were separate decisions by separate institutions; the latter should not be mistaken for an award or a reversal by the original committee.^[1][2]

Studies and the circulation of the image

The National Gallery holds a separate Horse Study for “The Last of the Buffalo”, dated about 1888: an oil on paper measuring 35.24 × 48.74 cm.^[8] Its specific title provides another kind of evidence for the painting's preparation, alongside the revisions beneath the large canvases. A study of an individual motif and work on the complete arrangement are different stages of making. The small sheet does not settle which monumental version was begun first or establish that every figure was worked out in advance.

The subject also circulated in print. An 1891 photogravure in the National Gallery, printed by Boussod et Valadon, reproduces the composition in black on paper. Its record distinguishes Bierstadt's name and copyright date printed in the plate from a graphite dedication to Senator Sherman. The plate measures 40.96 × 69.22 cm, a very different scale from the canvas.^[9]

This example gives the image a life beyond its exhibition and eventual museum acquisition. The dedication identifies a particular recipient, while the print format made another encounter with the composition possible. It does not establish the size of an edition or the political effect of this impression. What it does show is Bierstadt continuing to circulate his ambitious late subject after the contested Paris submission.

What conservation revealed

The two paintings underwent conservation in 1984–1985, allowing their materials and designs to be compared. Both have a substantial lead-white preparation beneath relatively thin layers of oil paint. The Cody canvas also contains a graphite-rich layer between the fabric and that white preparation. No such layer was found in the former Corcoran canvas.^[7]

Hartwell connects graphite with Bierstadt’s experiments in a small group of late paintings. She suggests that he may have sought to protect canvas from moisture and dirt, drawing on the protective qualities advertised for commercial graphite paints. This is a proposed explanation, not a recorded statement of his intention. Poor adhesion associated with the material helps explain why such paintings can present difficult conservation problems.^[10]

The National Gallery painting has its own material vulnerabilities. Hartwell and Parkin describe a granular surface and paint with insufficient binding medium, with small losses and abrasion associated with earlier cleaning.^[7][10]

The most conspicuous reconstruction belongs to the Cody version. At some earlier date, a section containing the standing bison at the left had been removed and replaced with a piece of another painting. During the 1984–1985 treatment, surviving traces of the original hump and hoof shadows helped establish the animal’s position. Conservators used the corresponding bison in the former Corcoran canvas, together with a reproduction, to reconstruct it on the retained insert.^[7] The standing bison visible in the National Gallery painting is not that reconstruction.

A history that continues beyond “the last”

The title closes around a threat of disappearance. The history of buffalo and Native nations continues beyond that moment. The InterTribal Buffalo Council traces its beginnings to a February 1991 gathering of nineteen Tribes in the Black Hills, united around restoring buffalo to Tribal lands for cultural and spiritual purposes.^[11] Its account gives Native people an active place in restoration, rather than treating them as figures whose history ended with the nineteenth-century herds.

The council's description of its work brings cultural renewal, spiritual life, ecological restoration and economic development together.^[12] These purposes broaden what restoring buffalo can mean. Keeping an animal alive and sustaining relationships among animals, land and people are connected responsibilities, with decisions made by the communities involved.

This perspective adds something the painting cannot supply on its own. Bierstadt makes a mounted hunter part of an arresting spectacle; the council speaks about continuing work in the communities to which buffalo matter. The distinction allows us to take the image's concern for loss seriously while resisting its suggestion that Indigenous life belongs to a vanishing world. The vast painted herd remains a powerful invention, seen today alongside histories of survival and renewal that have their own voices and purposes.