Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) was a German American painter best known for his depictions of the nineteenth-century American West. Having grown up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where his family settled when they immigrated in 1831, Bierstadt returned to Germany in his twenties to study with members of the highly acclaimed Düsseldorf school of painting. He moved back to America in 1857, and soon after was contracted by the U.S. government to travel west with a land surveyor to create sketches and drawings of the region. Upon his return to the East, Bierstadt converted many of the sketches into finished paintings, and his interest in the American West continued throughout his career.

The Last of the Buffalo

In the following painting from 1888, Bierstadt laments the pending extinction of the buffalo, which had become a pressing issue in the late 1880s as a result of westward expansion. The painting raised awareness of the problem, and following an official government census, a conservation plan was implemented.