Lure of the West

A collection of paintings and sculptures by artists who travelled west in the decades following explorations by Lewis and Clark. Emmanuel Leutze, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran portrayed the expanding frontier as a fertile field for democratic enterprise. Pristine wilderness contended with rapid economic development in pictures of the Gold Rush and western settlements. Such artists as Charles Bird King, George Catlin, Irving Couse and Olin Warner created artworks that express changing attitudes toward Native American cultures over several decades, ranging from curious and admiring in the early years to elegiac and resigned as the tribal groups were defeated and confined on reservations. In the 1890s, the rugged landscapes and exotic Hispanic cultures of the Southwest inspired a generation of artists known as the Taos School, who romanticized the West as a place of primal beauty and spiritual values.