Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), Buffalo, 1859, oil on paper, 14 x 19”. JKM Collection ®, National Museum of Wildlife Art.
An Albert Bierstadt painting titled Buffalo was recently on loan to the National Museum of Wildlife Art, until the owner had other plans for the work—they donated it to the museum.
The image shows a buffalo resting on the ground while five other animals mill about behind it. The painting, which has a moody background and a mustard-yellow foreground, was painted in 1859, quite early in the painter’s long career. Although Bierstadt was widely known, both in the 1800s and today, for being a landscape painter, his works with figures or wildlife subjects are well documented and just as prized as his landscapes. In fact, one of his most famous works is The Last of the Buffalo, showing a Native American rider doing battle with a buffalo on the edge of a vast valley filled with animals.
In the book Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West, curator Karen B. McWhorter with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, notes that Bierstadt had a history of “featuring Plains Indians and the American bison. As artists had before him, Bierstadt regarded these figures as protagonists in the drama unfolding in 19th-century Western America, a region that was rapidly changing.”
While the action of The Last Buffalo is not present in this recent acquisition at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the buffalo is still quite an imposing form with tall shoulders, a massive head and a glint of red sparkling out of its eye. The work is now on view at the Wyoming museum. —
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