The Last of the Buffalo

Description

The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt brings a dramatic bison hunt into a vast landscape of open plains, distant mountains and luminous clouds. In the foreground, a mounted Indigenous hunter confronts a powerful buffalo, while scattered animals and bones introduce a somber note beneath the expansive sky.

Painted in 1888–1889, the work joins Bierstadt’s theatrical landscape style to a subject charged with loss. The scale of the setting contrasts with the violence of the encounter, and the title directs attention toward the destruction of the great buffalo herds. This composition is the version now held by the National Gallery of Art, formerly in the Corcoran collection.