This
lovely painting by Albert Bierstadt portrays a buffalo herd crossing a
river. If you look carefully, you can see that the string of
buffalo is endless, curving beyond the river, trailing off and vanishing in the distance. Compositionally, the center of the painting is wonderfully anchored by the two bright and matching ovals of river and sky. Like a number of his Yosemite paintings,
Bierstadt restricted this scene to the essential elements. This
is very much an Eden. The clouds, the suffused light of the sky
and the reflective glow of the water show the American west from a romantic
perspective.
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