If this summer’s visitors to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West are any indication, nineteenth-century artist Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) has a whole new following. This fall, the Center’s exhibition Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West moves to Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leaving in its wake great memories, compelling stories, and of course, […]
In this image, Bierstadt sits in his studio working on a western scene as an audience of peers looks on. Behind him hangs a painted hide, and on his easel sits a stereocard likely made on the Lander Expedition. Bierstadt drew inspiration from photographs and from Native American artifacts he collected on his western trips. […]
Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West would not have been possible without the generous support of many donors. For this funding in support of the scholarly catalogue and major traveling exhibition organized in conjunction with Gilcrease Museum, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is profoundly grateful. Our donors are listed below in alphabetical […]
When Bierstadt’s painting The Last of the Buffalo was displayed in Paris in 1889, his urgent message about the looming extinction of American bison was amplified to an international audience. Bierstadt’s painting, on view at the Paris Salon, was at the center of artistic, cultural, and political discourse about the American West on a global […]
Albert Bierstadt’s paintings may have contributed to the profound changes occurring in the American West in the late 1800s. Across Bierstadt’s thirty-year career, his depictions of an idealized western landscape helped inspire new waves of pioneers to follow Manifest Destiny, the concept that westward expansion by Euro-Americans was divinely sanctioned and inevitable. But Bierstadt’s paintings […]
We hope you enjoy the short, five-minute video (the next stop, iScout 172), which calls your attention to aspects of Albert Bierstadt’s paintings, The Buffalo Trail, The Buffalo Trail: Impending Storm, and Western Kansas. The video explores possible messages and meanings in Bierstadt’s depictions of bison in the American West. As an academically trained painter […]