Bierstadt, Albert - The Last of the Buffalo (1888)

Albert Bierstadt did not paint The Last of the Buffalo to impress the art critics of his day. He painted it because a continent was bleeding out and nobody seemed to care. The year was 1888. The American frontier was closing fast and the great bison herds were being slaughtered into extinction. Bierstadt took up his brush and created a massive fictional landscape. He poured his grief into an entirely imagined geography of western mountains and sweeping plains. At over nine feet wide the canvas was a desperate plea masquerading as a pretty picture.

The American selection committee for the 1889 Paris Exposition took one look at the monumental oil painting and rejected it outright. They thought his romantic vision was hopelessly out of fashion. The art elites wanted something modern and chic. They did not want a dusty relic mourning a dying beast.

Bierstadt was sidelined by the tastemakers but he had the last laugh. The painting struck a nerve far outside those velvet rope galleries. It hit the public hard. Everyday people looked at the majestic scene and saw exactly what they were about to lose forever. The rejected work bypassed the snobs and helped spark the early American wildlife conservation movement. It stands today as a testament to what we almost destroyed entirely. It reminds us that sometimes the outcasts and the unfashionable are the only ones brave enough to tell the ugly truth.

References

Anderson, Nancy K. Albert Bierstadt Art and Enterprise. New York, Hudson Hills Press, 1990.

Hassrick, Peter H. Albert Bierstadt Painter of the American West. New York, Abbeville Press, 1999.

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