Les Derniers Bisons

By the late 1880s the great bison herds of the American plains, once numbering in the tens of millions, had been shot down to a few hundred animals. Albert Bierstadt painted this enormous canvas, six by ten feet, in 1888, staging a thundering hunt between mounted Plains warriors and buffalo while skulls and bones lie scattered across the foreground. It is a composed, imagined scene, stitched together from sketches of many different places, and it looks back at a West that was already gone. When Bierstadt submitted it to represent American art at the 1889 world's fair in Paris, a committee of fellow artists rejected it as old-fashioned. He showed it at the Paris Salon instead, where Lakota performers touring with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show came to stand in front of it.