The wild west in darktown: the buffalo chase – Vintage Wall Art
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: The wild west in darktown: the buffalo chase, preserved in this antique lithograph. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
Choose the framed print, ready to hang the day it arrives, or the unframed print for a frame of your own. A conversation-starting piece for home, office, or as a meaningful gift. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
The wild west in darktown: the buffalo chase
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Despite its place on this board, this print is not about the city. Its subject is a buffalo chase staged as a comic parody of the Wild West shows that drew large crowds in the 1880s and 1890s. Currier & Ives issued it around 1893 as part of its Darktown series of hand-colored lithographs, which mocked African Americans through racist stereotypes, and the joke depends on that ridicule. By then the bison had been nearly wiped out on the plains, so the hunt was already a nostalgic image. Today the print is most useful as evidence of how popular printmakers portrayed Black Americans.
| Created / published | New York : Published by Currier & Ives, c1893. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph, hand-colored. |
| Genre | c1983 |
| Notes | Caricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 998 px · prints to 5 × 3 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-175268 |
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