Art of the American West: Artistic Style & Methods

The West reached Eastern audiences through three very different kinds of picture, and this archive holds all three.

The first is the field record. Catlin's original 1830s portraits, now at the Smithsonian, were painted from life on his journeys; the Cartoon Collection paintings he made in the 1850s and 1860s from his outline drawings go further, setting two, three or four people side by side against a plain ground and labeling each with a name and a role - chief, warrior, wife, medicine man - taken from his own notes. Those labels, and Catlin's renderings of names and nations ("Camanchee," "Saukie," "Ojibbeway," "Riccarree"), are preserved in the National Gallery's catalog data and in the titles shown here; they are his spellings, not the names the nations use today. Alongside the portraits he painted villages, dances, games, buffalo hunts, burning prairies and the bluffs of the upper Missouri as a kind of illustrated ethnography, and he repeatedly painted himself at work - at his easel before the Mandan leader Mah-to-toh-pa, or sketching from a canoe in South America - to vouch for his presence. Historians have questioned some of his claims, most famously his boast of being the first white man to see the Minnesota pipestone quarries.

The second is the expedition print. Maximilian, who had studied natural science, wanted an exact record, and Bodmer's watercolors of people, objects and customs are counted among the most accurate ever made of the upper Missouri. Translated into plates for Maximilian's Travels, they were printed in combinations of etching, aquatint and mezzotint and often colored by hand - as in the archive's Bison-Dance of the Mandan Indians and Sih-Chida and Mahchsi-Karehde.

The third is the exhibition landscape. Bierstadt sketched outdoors in oil on paper - the Met's studies of Native American leaders made at Fort Laramie around 1859 are an example - and then built huge studio canvases that combined and heightened what he had seen; Lander's Peak, more than ten feet wide, was launched with a single-picture exhibition, a pamphlet and engravings, and the Native encampment in its foreground was placed, as one scholar has noted, in the middle distance as part of the scenery rather than as individuals. Moran worked from survey sketches too, but his Yellowstone watercolors of 1872-73, in watercolor and gouache - two of them on blue paper - are small, vivid and close to the geology; he also reworked western subjects such as the Mountain of the Holy Cross and Green River as etchings. Remington's bronzes, finally, turned illustration into sculpture: The Bronco Buster grew out of his own magazine drawings of bucking horses, including one for Theodore Roosevelt's 1888 Century Magazine article 'The Home Ranch'.