Albert Bierstadt

This book adds significantly to American art scholarship, moving beyond Albert Bierstadt’s canonical western landscapes to focus on his portrayals of animals and Native Americans within the context of environmental and ethnographic issues in the late nineteenth century. Delving deeply into the status of bison and Native Americans in the closing decades of the frontier era, the book explores a variety of works by Bierstadt and others. It positions the artist and his subjects within a rich nexus of the period’s fledgling conservation movement (especially the Boone and Crockett Club, and the work of individuals such as George Bird Grinnell and William Hornaday), Native American perspectives, and the transatlantic exhibition of Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo (1888)—which coincided with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show’s European performances. Positioning Bierstadt as an environmentalist and ethnographer, the book opens new avenues of inquiry, not only into his work and American western art more generally, but also into ways cultural and environmental transformations are transacted, displayed, and interpreted.

American west · Archaeology · Art history · Club · Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Ethnography · Ethnology · Exhibition · Frontier · Performance art · Political science · ROWE · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual art of the United States · Witness · Anthropology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture