Proud Legacy: 150 Years of Western Art

Stephen May

19th-Century Artists Depict the Unknown West

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Charles Bird King, Peahmuska (The Fox Chief Wending His Course) [1824], oil, 27 x 14, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN.

This article is the first in a year-long series chronicling the development of the western American art movement. Next month, Stephen May focuses on the period 1900-10.

Few movements in human history have captured the popular imagination more than the taming of the American West. From the time of our nation’s beginnings, the re-gion west of the Mississippi has been viewed as a land of mystery and promise, a place to project dreams and ambitions, a symbol of the un-known and the future. The same zeal for land, freedom, and opportunity that incited Europeans to settle the East Coast impelled their descendants to push westward into uncharted areas and stimulated artists to add impetus to that movement in the 19th century.

After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 more than doubled the size of the United States and gave rise to the idea of Manifest Destiny, artist-explorers were inevitably drawn to the grand drama and tremendous panorama of the western frontier. With its boundless prairies, vast forests, enormous mountains, mighty rivers, and exotic Indian population, the West was a magnificent stage that challenged the best of the young nation’s artistic talent.

Samuel Seymour, View of the Rocky Mountains., painting, southwest art.

Samuel Seymour, View of the Rocky Mountains [n.d.], hand-
colored engraving, 6 x 83⁄4, Stark Museum of Art, Orange, TX.

Able and daring artists responded at first with careful renderings of the flora, fauna, terrain, and Native Americans of this unknown region. They were followed by increasingly skilled painters whose robust depictions of natural wonders and courageous settlers taming an immense continent helped shape America’s sense of itself. Westward expansion, encouraged by our painters and sculptors, became a 19th-century article of faith, molding our democratic values of rugged individualism, self-reliance, ingenuity, and optimism about the future. By the time historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared more than a century ago that our frontier days had ended when we reached the Pacific, the West was fully ingrained in the national spirit and psyche.

William T. Ranney, Hunting Wild Horses [c. 1845-55], oil, 36 x 541⁄2, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Los Angeles, CA.

In recent years, revisionist historians have challenged those time-honored beliefs, pointing to the conflict, despoliation, and Indian displacement that accompanied westward expansion. Few have contested, however, the significance of the artwork that emerged from that central chapter in America’s history.

Among the earliest white men who ventured beyond the frontier in the early 19th century were artists accompanying government survey expeditions. Two of the first trained artists to go West were Titian Ramsay Peale [1799-1885], youngest son of painter/museum pioneer Charles Willson Peale, and English-born Samuel Seymour [1796-1823], both of whom were part of Major Stephen H. Long’s topographical expedition up the Missouri River and to the Rocky

Seth Eastman, Ballplay of the Sioux on the St. Peters River in Winter. , painting, southwest art.

Seth Eastman, Ballplay of the Sioux on the St. Peters River in
Winter [1848], oil, 253⁄4 x 351⁄4, Amon Carter Museum.

Mountains in 1819-21. Traveling thousands of miles in the company of soldiers and scientists, they recorded the indigenous people and scenic wonders of the West including the first images of the Rocky Mountains, such as Seymour’s engraving View of the Rocky Mountains.

Pursuing an even more ambitious mission, in 1837 artist naturalist John James Audubon [1785-1851] visited Texas to document birds and animals.

During visits to Galveston Island and Houston he observed and recorded such birds as the turkey vulture, white pelican, and whooping crane and animals like the American bison or buffalo, red Texas wolf, and Texas lynx.

George Catlin, A Stag and a Doe [n.d.], oil, 191⁄4 x 263⁄4, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Jackson, WY.

The first extensive portrayals of Native Americans were executed in the 1820s by Charles Bird King [1785-1862] not in the West but in Washington, DC. A New England native who trained in London, King was commissioned by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to make likenesses of Native Americans who were visiting the nation’s capitol to negotiate treaties.

Between 1821 and 1840 King produced nearly 150 portraits of Indians from 20 tribes, which formed the nucleus of the National Indian Portrait Gallery that was destroyed in a fire at the Smithsonian Institution in 1865. Among the surviving oil paintings is Peahmuska (The Fox Chief Wending His Course). Typical King mixtures of realism and idealism, these images present appropriately

Alfred Jacob Miller, A Surround of Buffalo by Indians, painting, southwest art.

Alfred Jacob Miller, A Surround of Buffalo by Indians
[c. 1848-58], oil, 303⁄8 x 441⁄8, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY.

pensive, wary Native American leaders in outdoor settings, presumably on the verge of approving treaties ceding lands to the federal government.

Another East Coast artist who depicted Native Americans was John Wesley Jarvis [1780-1839]. One of the New York City portrait artist’s best-known works is Black Hawk and His Son, Whirling Thunder, a compelling image contrasting a proud, aging chief in Indian garb with his youthful son in Anglo clothing.

The sight of Plains Indians passing through Philadelphia on their way to Washington motivated George Catlin [1796-1872] to give up his law practice and devote himself to recording the rapidly disappearing life of Native

George Caleb Bingham, Wood-Boatman on a River-detail [n.d.], oil, 29 x 361⁄4, Amon Carter Museum.

Americans. “My heart bleeds for the fate that awaits the remainder of their unlucky race,” he lamented. In 1832 Catlin began crisscrossing the unmapped West, painting hundreds of portraits of Indians of some 50 tribes, as well as tribal rituals, hunting scenes, and landscapes.

Painted under often difficult circumstances, Catlin’s “living monuments of a noble race” tend to be somewhat sketchy, but the accuracy and perceptiveness of the figures and details of their clothing make these works an invaluable historical resource. Less well known are his evocative wildlife likenesses, such as A Stag and a Doe.

Unlike Catlin, who traveled without subsidy, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer [1809-1893] accompanied German Prince Maximilian von Wied-Neuwied on a scientific expedition along the Missouri River in the early 1830s. A superb

Charles Deas, Sioux Playing Ball [1843], oil, 30 x 361⁄2, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK.

draftsman, perceptive chronicler, and peerless documentary reporter, Bodmer recorded in exquisite detail the life, habits, and customs of various Indian tribes. Later published as prints illustrating the prince’s writings, they offered a visual history of Northern Plains Indian culture. Bodmer’s works include the engraving Pehriska-Ruhpa [see page 8], showing a Hidasta headman in the costume of a Mandan dog dancer, called by western art authority Royal B. Hassrick “perhaps the most dramatic Indian portrait ever painted.”

Accompanying expeditions to the Southwest, Philadelphia artist Richard Kern [d. 1853] was among the first to depict that region. His watercolor sketches such as Valley of Taos, Looking South, New Mexico conveyed both the Spanish influence and magnificent scenery of the area. Underscoring the dangers confronting these artists-explorers, Kern was slain by Indians while on a survey team in Utah in 1853.

Carl Wimar, Buffalo Hunt [1861], oil, 22 x 33, Gilcrease Museum.

Paintings of Indian life in the 1830s to 1850s tended to reinforce the concept of Native Americans as “noble savages” completely at home in spacious surroundings. For instance, A Surround of Buffalo by Indians by Baltimore, MD, artist Alfred Jacob Miller [1810-1874] reflects the painter’s respect for what he termed the “native grace and self-possession of the Indians” along with his awe at the spectacle of “thousands of buffalo moving in every direction over the broad and vast prairies.”

Another significant painter who immortalized the life of western frontiersmen was New York- and New Jersey-based William T. Ranney [1813-1857]. While serving

Hermann Herzog, Caribou by a Mountain Lake [c. 1880s], oil, 29 x 40, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

in the army in the Mexican War, he became fascinated with Plains life and devoted the rest of his life to creating both animated and quiet views of activities among early western pioneers, such as Hunting Wild Horses.

The first significant artist to settle west of the Mississippi was George Caleb Bingham [1811-1879], who depicted life among the settlers, squatters, riverboatmen, and country politicians on the Missouri frontier in the 1840s and ’50s. His work, much of which was widely distributed in prints, ranged from the romanticized Wood-Boatman on a River to paintings anticipating negative images of Native Americans.

William Fuller, Crow Creek Agency, Dakota Territory-detail [1884], oil, 245⁄8 x 523⁄4, Amon Carter Museum.

Charles Deas [1818-1867] specialized in melodramatic western scenes of danger and death. His knowledge of Indian life, based on travels in the West, is reflected in Sioux Playing Ball.

Not long after Catlin’s pioneering explorations of the West, John Mix Stanley [1814-1872] set out from Detroit, MI, to record Indian likenesses and customs. He traveled widely, often with official government expeditions, and accompanied troops in the Mexican War. Like Catlin’s work, Stanley’s gallery of Indian portraits was widely exhibited, but while Congress deliberated its purchase, most were destroyed in the Smithsonian fire of 1865 that also claimed the King collection.

Albert Bierstadt, Teton Range, Moose, WY-detail [c. 1863], oil, 121⁄2 x 181⁄2, painting, southwest art.

Albert Bierstadt, Teton Range, Moose, WY-detail [c. 1863], oil, 121⁄2 x 181⁄2,
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, CO.

Among Stanley’s extant genre works are depictions of Indians gambling and playing cards, such as Gambling for the Buck and Blackfeet Card Players. The latter was purchased last year at Sotheby’s by veteran Denver collector Philip Anschutz for $1,652,000 a record for the artist.

West Point graduate Seth Eastman [1808-1875] became a major painter of Indian life and western topography while serving in frontier military outposts. Ballplay of the Sioux on the St. Peters River in Winter depicts the roughhouse sport that was a forerunner of lacrosse. Between 1850 and ’55 Eastman also produced nearly 300 plates used to illustrate Henry R. Schoolcraft’s five-volume study of Indian tribes.

William Henry Jackson, California Crossing, South Platte River-detail [1867], painting, southwest art.

William Henry Jackson, California Crossing, South Platte River-detail [1867], oil, 22 x 34, Gilcrease Museum.

Stanley and German émigré Carl Wimar [1828-1862] were among the first artists of the West to use photography as a source for their work. Growing up in St. Louis, MO, Wimar made many Indian friends; after he trained in Germany, they became his principal theme in paintings of attacks on forts, ceremonies, and hunting scenes, such as the dramatic Buffalo Hunt.

“Wimar was the youngest of the first generation of Indian painters,” art historian Perry T. Rathbone has written, “yet none of them—Catlin, Eastman, Miller, or Stanley—are the equal of Wimar in the authenticity of their record, the command of their craft, nor in imaginative power.” Sadly, Wimar died at 34 before his full artistic potential could be realized.

Thomas Moran, The Mirage [1879], oil, 251⁄8 x 622⁄3, Stark Museum of Art.

As conflicts between white settlers and Indians increased around mid-century, less-gentle depictions of Native Americans appeared in artwork. “Noble red men” were increasingly portrayed as hostile savages. “It was easier to destroy bloodthirsty savages than Catlin’s benign Indians,” National Museum of American Art curator William H. Truettner has observed.

Popular were depictions of Indian attacks on pioneer caravans and of outnumbered white men

Henry F. Farny, Indians on the Plains [1896], gouache, 15 x 29, Eiteljorg Museum.

being pursued by vengeful Native Americans, as in Arthur F. Tait’s Prairie Hunter, “One Rubbed Out!” An Englishman who had never visited the West, Tait [1819-1905] nonetheless was employed by Currier and Ives to illustrate Indian and western life for widely disseminated lithographic prints that helped define the West for easterners.

The idea that Indians were doomed and would eventually succumb to the forces of white civilization became an increasingly major theme in the second half of the 19th century. This move- ment to “civilize”

Joseph Becker, Snow Sheds on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, May 1869 [c. 1869], oil, 19 x 26, Gilcrease Museum.

Indians and absorb them into mainstream culture was reflected in a marvelously naive landscape, Crow Creek Agency, Dakota Territory by William Fuller, a carpenter with the agency. In this Peaceable Kingdom gone West, teepees and Indians in traditional dress coexist on the outskirts of an orderly town inhabited by well-dressed whites, while two Indians in suits suggest that Native Americans might aspire to assume a future assimilated status.

The greatest stir regarding the West, however, was generated by a group of skilled, ambitious landscape painters led by Albert Bierstadt, whose grandiose paintings glorified the scenic splendors of the region and stimulated enormous national pride in it. The sheer size and sweeping panoramas of these works captivated people back East who crowded galleries to gaze in awe at spectacular images of the Sierra Nevadas, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone.

Thomas Worthington Whittredge, Deer Watering [1875], oil, 253⁄4 x 223⁄8, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Raised in New England but trained in his native Germany, Bierstadt [1830-1902] first traveled to Wyoming with the Lander survey expedition in 1858. Applying both fertile imagination and audacious technique, he devoted himself thereafter to great composite canvases that amplified the majestic scenery of the West.

Bierstadt created dramatic paintings with painstaking attention to topographical detail and vivid lighting. Although regarded by most observers as realistic depictions, his works actually included a good deal of artistic license and often contained elements more reminiscent of the Alps than the Rockies. Although Bierstadt is known for his large-scale visions of the virgin West, his smaller oil sketches such as Teton Range, Moose, WY reflect similarly expansive views.

Hermann Herzog [1831-1932] was another German-born and trained painter who traveled extensively in the West. Herzog offered more direct and less theatrical landscapes than Bierstadt, but they were equally sweeping, such as Caribou by a Mountain Lake.

Thomas Hill, Mt. Hood-detail [1880], oil, 271⁄2 x 50, Gilcrease Museum.

As the nation embraced the concept of Manifest Destiny and the pace of expansion into unexplored western regions accelerated after the Civil War, artists were encouraged to execute positive images to offset bleak accounts of the rigors of frontier travel and settlement. Picturesque evocations of wagon trains bumping across the western landscape became a popular subject. Typical is California Crossing, South Platte River by artist-photographer William Henry Jackson [1843-1942], which captured the magnitude of the movement across the region.

John Wesley Jarvis, Black Hawk and His Son, Whirling Thunder [1833], oil, 233⁄4 x 30, Gilcrease Museum.

The technological triumph of the transcontinental railroad offered an interesting subject for artists, some of whom, like Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, were hired by railroads to execute lofty, benign views glorifying their achievements. By contrast, the backbreaking labor of Chinese workers was immortalized in a naive painting Snow Sheds on the Central Pacific Railroad in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, May 1869 by Joseph H. Becker [1841-1910], a staff artist for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper.

Bierstadt’s major rival as a master of the grand western landscape was British-born Thomas Moran [1837-1926], who spent four decades painting the region, eventually settling in California. Joining Ferdinand V. Hayden’s government survey expedition to Yellowstone in 1872, Moran was captivated by the wild, idyllic beauty of the West, which he recorded in both deft watercolors and expansive oil canvases such as The Mirage.

Harry Learned, Robinson, Colorado-detail [1887], oil, 181⁄2 x 301⁄2, Amon Carter Museum.

Moran’s early watercolors of Yellowstone helped influence passage of legislation establishing it as our first national park. He became so associated with the place that he took to signing his works “T. Yellowstone Moran.” Congress purchased his huge Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and Chasm of the Colorado [1873-74] for installation in the U.S. Capitol. They are now at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

Although his paintings equaled Bierstadt’s in theatricality, Moran’s views tended to be truer to nature. More than any other artist, his images contributed to America’s conception of the West as a place of edenic wonders and a source of national pride.

James Walker, Vaqueros Lassoing a Bear [1877], oil, 30 x 501⁄4, Gilcrease Museum.

Other talented painters who created majestic views of the West included Thomas Worthington Whittredge [1820-1910], best known for bucolic scenes of rivers, plains, and mountains like Deer Watering. Hudson River School stalwart Sanford Gifford [1823-1880] traveled with one of Hayden’s geological surveys, leading to expansive landscapes such as Valley of the Chugwater, Wyom-ing Territory. And Thomas Hill [1829-1908] was the first artist to set up a studio in Yosemite, which he depicted in innumerable pictures for the tourist trade. He also traveled to Oregon, where he painted Mt. Hood.

Charles M. Russell, For Supremacy-detail [1895], oil, 231⁄8 x 35, Amon Carter Museum.

By the time Moran reached Yellowstone, nearly all of the West had been explored, much of the region had been settled, most confrontations with Native Americans were over, and the world of cowboys and Indians had all but vanished. Alarmed by the dis- appearance of frontier virtues and increasing urbanization, toward the end of the century artists sought to canonize the Old West. Often working for popular illustrated magazines and newspapers, such artists resurrected the drama of settling a new land, opening up new frontiers, and establishing the cattle industry on the plains.

Henry F. Farny [1847-1916], a native of Alsace-Lorraine, France, who made Cincinnati, OH, his

Edgar Samuel Paxson, Custer s Last Stand detail [1899], oil, 701⁄2 x 106,, painting, southwest art.

Edgar Samuel Paxson, Custer’s Last Stand-detail [1899], oil, 701⁄2 x 106, Buffalo Bill

base but studied in Europe, traveled frequently in the West and became a prolific illustrator of books and magazines as well as a popular painter of western oils. He was especially known for depicting the quieter aspects of Indian life, such as camp scenes and views of braves on the trail, as in Indians on the Plains.

Charles Schreyvogel [1861-1912], born into a poor family on New York’s Lower East Side, worked as a lithographer and received training in Munich before realizing his life’s ambition by visiting the West in his 30s. Utilizing collected artifacts as props, he painted on the roof of his apartment building in Hoboken, NJ, with local athletes and a neighborhood handyman as models. Schreyvogel’s canvases told stirring stories of a vanished West—troopers in violent combat with Indians, dramatic cavalry charges, kidnappings by Native American renegades, and attacks on stockades. Reflecting his enduring popularity, his The Silenced War Whoop from the Eulich western art collection fetched $1,267,500—a record for the artist at Sotheby’s last May. The purchaser was Denver collector Anschutz.

Solon H. Borglum, Lassoing Wild Horses [1898], bronze, 313⁄4 x 331⁄4 National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Oklahoma City, OK.

Also painting the west toward the end of the century was Colorado resident Harry Learned [active 1874-1896], who recorded meticulously detailed, rather primitive views of mining districts, including Robinson, Colorado. And English-born James Walker [1819-1889], known for painting battle scenes of the Mexican War and Civil War, also recorded the lives of Mexicans living in California, as in Vaqueros Lassoing a Bear.

A Yale dropout from northern New York, Frederic Remington [1861-1909] fell in love with the West on a trip to Montana in 1881 and was inspired to capture “the Old America which is fast passing.” He became a successful magazine illustrator and then a painter and sculptor of western scenes based on frequent visits to the region.

Working in a studio outside New York City, Remington used his supreme gift of narration to depict hard-riding cowboys and stately Indians on horseback, gallant cavalrymen and muscular steeds, rearing broncos and resilient corrals, roundups and campfires, and countless other images recalling rugged life on the Plains. His oil paintings, filled with vivid color and anecdotes, set the tone for a generation of artists who immortalized the mythic, vanishing West. Among his best-known works is the action-filled A Dash for the Timber [see page 17]. Remington’s virtuoso sculptures, starting with the highly animated Bronco Buster and The Scalp, reflected his conviction that “sculpture is the most perfect expression of action.”

Charles M. Russell [1864-1926] was raised in an affluent family in St. Louis, MO, but as a teenager settled in Montana, working as a trapper and cowboy and living among Indians for a time. Self-taught, he parlayed his innate talent for sketching into western illustrations for Harper’s Weekly and went on to become a highly successful painter and sculptor.

In some of his paintings, such as For Supremacy, Russell portrayed the more dramatic aspects of western life—mortal combat among rival Indian tribes, confrontations between Native Americans and whites, horse thieves versus lawmen, sharpshooters and their quarry, the chaotic tumult of a buffalo stampede, and longhorns crossing dusty plains. Drawing on his life among Montana’s Native Americans, ranch hands, saloon keepers, and his neighbors, Russell solidified his reputation as the Cowboy Artist. In addition, Russell’s vigorous sculptures, which recorded similar activities, offered especially perceptive images of animals.

Along with Remington and Russell, a number of talented sculptors embraced western themes toward the end of the 19th century. Among them was Utah native Cyrus E. Dallin [1861-1944], who grew up among Indians and became well known for large public sculptures that captured their dignity and nobility. His series on the long struggle between the Indian and the white man began with The Signal of Peace, which stands today in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. The Medicine Man is in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park.

Another noted sculptor was Solon H. Borglum [1868-1922], who grew up in Nebraska and came to know the animals and Native Americans of the region. He depicted these images in numerous animated sculptures, beginning with Lassoing Wild Horses, that rivaled the work of Remington and Russell for accuracy and action.

In 1899 Edgar Samuel Paxson painted his sprawling depiction of Custer’s Last Stand, which contains more than 200 figures locked in mortal combat a far cry from the more peaceful earlier portraits by Charles Bird King and John Wesley Jarvis. Paxson [1852-1919], who came from the East and settled in Montana, completed his masterpiece 23 years after the battle at Little Bighorn. A special treasure of western art, it epitomizes images of a West that was no more a theme that dominated the region’s artwork late in the 19th century.

As the 1800s came to an end, the frontier was closed, as Frederick Jackson Turner had proclaimed, and living pioneers were few and far between. But subjects for artists of imagination and ambition were plentiful, as we shall see, in the West of the 20th century.