Western American Art
Western American art broadly names the works that depict the American West and the Old West period - cowboys, Native Americans, horses, cattle and scenic landscape. Unlike much modern art, it prizes subject and narrative over style, and it developed alongside U.S. westward expansion: George Catlin recorded members of more than fifty Native tribes from the 1830s, Thomas Moran fixed the drama of western scenery on canvas, and Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell turned cowboy life into legend, Russell from firsthand experience as a working cowboy. Long dismissed as marginal illustration, the field became a subject of serious academic study in the twentieth century, with art colonies in California and New Mexico carrying it forward and museums now devoted to it.
Defining characteristics
- Narrative subjects: cowboys, Native Americans, horses, cattle drives and frontier life
- Big-sky western landscape - canyons, plains and mountain vistas as dramatic stage
- Realist illustration skill: dynamic action, accurate gear, animals and costume
- Nostalgic, often romanticized views of the Old West as it passed into history
- Documentary attention to ethnographic detail in depictions of Native peoples
Key figures
- Frederic Remington (1861-1909) — Illustrator-painter and sculptor who made cowboy action the genre's iconography
- Charles M. Russell (1864-1926) — Ex-cowboy painter and sculptor who recorded the Montana range from the inside
- George Catlin (1796-1872) — Portraitist who painted members of more than fifty Native tribes from the 1830s
- Thomas Moran (1837-1926) — Painter of grand western panoramas such as Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho
Example works
- The Toll Collectors — Charles M. Russell (1913)
- Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho — Thomas Moran (c. 1875)
- The Stampede — Frederic Remington (1909)
Sources
- Western American Art - Wikipedia encyclopedia