Painters and the American West

This book takes us on a connoisseur's tour of art of the Old West, guiding us through the Anschutz collection, the finest group of paintings of the American West still in private hands. Joan Carpenter Troccoli looks at these paintings as aesthetic objects rather than historical documents, allowing us to see each work as a self-conscious fashioning of a personal vision and an integral part of mainstream American art.

The collection is wide-ranging in scope, covering every phase in the history of American art since the 1820s. There are works from all the major artists who have depicted the West, including those who painted western subjects only occasionally as well as those whose subjects were predominantly western. Among the artists represented are Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, George Bellows, Ernest Blumenschein, George Catlin, Stuart Davis, Asher B. Durand, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, George Inness, Thomas Moran, John Marin, Alfred Jacob Miller, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, and Walter Ufer. The collection is particularly rich in paintings made in Taos and Santa Fe in the first half of the twentieth century, when major American artists often found inspiration and stylistic renewal in the Southwest.