Come join in the splendor of one North America’s proudest and most natural parades in The Buffalo Trail, an oil painting created in 1868 by by German- American Romantic painter Albert Bierstadt of the Rocky Mountain and Hudson River Schools. This oil painting was created around the time of one of the artist’s many trips painting the American West. A Romantic painting for its celebration of nature apart from humans, it is important to notice the manner in which the buffalo take on the role of subjects in this painting, leading the eye in a trail from the head buffalo standing apart from the pack on land back through the herd until the line disappears near the horizon. The subjects stand apart from the scene only through a difference in contrast from the light sky and reflective water. The eeriness of Bierstadt’s masterpiece is that the scene, painted in 1868, was done before the massive buffalo hunt of the 1870’s that ended this majestic beast’s North American reign. As the train of buffalo fade into the dusty distance, observe the technique used by Bierstadt to unknowingly add a ghost like haze to their form. It is as if the impending doom of the Buffalo is foreshadowed in this Albert Bierstadt painting by the setting sun and endless train disappearing into the distance. The spirit of the Buffalo lives on in this masterpiece.