Butchering the Buffalo

In May 1839, at the Apollo Gallery in New York, Miller exhibited eighteen paintings he had completed for Stewart’s Murthly Castle. Several of the works, such as Butchering a Buffalo, were pictorial accounts of specific activities in which Stewart had been eagerly and proudly engaged. They were biographical, and they were considered powerfully exotic. In this large oil, Stewart looks on as one of his minions removes the hump rib from a bison he has just killed. A reporter for the Weekly Herald of May 18, 1839, reflected the awe with which such a scene was viewed by New Yorkers. “Of Sir William himself, the originator, the traveler and the subject of the picturesque and grand, we hardly know how to speak. – The romance of his taste, and the enthusiasm of his character…are without a parallel in these days of steamboats and railroads.”

Peter H. Hassrick