The Last of the Buffalo

A Native American hunter on a rearing horse drives his spear into a charging buffalo amid a vast, thundering herd, with skulls and bones scattered across the foreground plain. Albert Bierstadt painted this dramatic, crowded scene as the great bison herds neared extinction, casting it as an elegy for a vanishing world. Now in the collection of the Corcoran, the Last of the Buffalo is both spectacle and lament - a grand, theatrical vision of the American West mourning the destruction of the buffalo and the way of life that depended on them.