Art of the American West: Cultural & Artistic Influence

The art in this archive shaped how Americans and Europeans imagined the West, and that influence cuts in several directions. Catlin's touring gallery and his publications made individual Native leaders - Mah-to-toh-pa (Four Bears) of the Mandan, Keokuk and Black Hawk of the Sauk, Osceola of the Seminole - known by name to audiences on two continents, and his and Bodmer's pictures remain primary visual records of people, dress, dwellings and ceremonies on the upper Missouri in the 1830s. Yet both men, like Bierstadt after them, worked inside the conviction that Native nations were destined to disappear, a belief that served the same expansion that was driving removal, war and epidemic disease. Catlin's 1832 plea for "a nation's Park," Bierstadt's Yosemite canvases (Lincoln signed the Yosemite grant in 1864) and Moran's Yellowstone views (the park was created in 1872) also tied Western painting to the national-park idea - parks whose creation, as the Cleveland Museum of Art notes of Yosemite, went hand in hand with the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples who lived there. Remington's and Schreyvogel's cavalry and cowboy subjects fed the popular Western of dime novels, Wild West shows and, later, film.