The Last of the Buffalo

The Last of the Buffalo is an oil on canvas painted around 1888 by the German-born American artist Albert Bierstadt; this is the smaller of his two versions of the subject, held by the Whitney Western Art Museum of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming (accession 2.60).

The pair belongs to the end of Bierstadt's career and to the campaign to save the American bison. By 1888 hide hunting had brought the species close to extinction, and a small remnant herd in Yellowstone National Park was being poached. Bierstadt was a charter member of the Boone and Crockett Club, founded in New York that January under Theodore Roosevelt to press for protection of the herd, and in the summer of 1888 he visited Buffalo Bill's Wild West camp on Staten Island to sketch bison and the Native performers. The two canvases that followed set a Plains buffalo hunt against a wide river valley and distant mesas: a rider on a white horse lunges with a lance at a charging bull, while dead and dying animals, skulls and scattered bones fill the foreground.

The larger version, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was rejected by the American selection committee for the 1889 Exposition Universelle and shown in Paris that year all the same. According to the Center, the Cody canvas was displayed in a London sales gallery in 1891 and fetched $50,000, which it describes as the highest price paid for an American artwork in the nineteenth century.

The Cody painting was later forgotten until about 1955, when it was found in England and brought to the United States by a dealer, who had it lined and put on a new stretcher. A conservation study published in 1999 found that it shares many design changes and pentimenti with the Washington picture, so neither is a copy of the other; the Cody version, 152.8 by 245.2 cm, repeats the same elements on a smaller scale. It was bought with the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Trust Fund and was the centrepiece of the 2018 exhibition Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West, shown in Cody and then at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa.