Review of The Rocky Mountains: A Vision for Artists in the Nineteenth Century By Patricia Trenton and Peter H. Hassrick & Karl Bodmer's America Introduction by william H. Goetzmann

Authors

Richard W. Etulain, University of New Mexico

Date of this Version

Winter 1985

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 5, No. 1, Winter 1985, pp. 66-69.

Comments

Copyright 1985 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Historians have generally paid less attention to western art than to other facets of western American cultural history such as literature, religion, and education. Perhaps this lacuna results from historians' lack of knowledge about art history or from their reluctance to venture into the tangled thickets of art criticism. At any rate, except for the useful book length studies of John C. Ewers and Robert Taft (both non-historians) and the less extensive but probing commentaries of William Goetzmann and two of his students, Brian Dippie and Joseph C. Porter, historians only occasionally discuss artistic treatments of the American West.¹ Yet the two books under review and other publications appearing in the last few years suggest that a more analytical group of commentators is at work on western art. Their studies-and the two books cited here-promise much-needed reevaluations of artistic works 66 about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West.

In this regard, The Rocky Mountains is noteworthy because it adds much to one's understanding of western frontier art. Patricia Trenton and Peter Hassrick, art historians with several publications on western art to their credit, concentrate here on one subregion of the West-the Rocky Mountains broadly considered-and one major topic, landscape depictions of the Rockies. In discussing landscapes painted from about 1820 to 1900, the authors provide detailed commentaries on artists who traveled with explorers like Stephen H. Long and John C. Fremont, with European and American patrons, with government surveys, with overland trail and other private groups, and who worked as reporters for magazines.

The Rocky Mountains includes discussions of dozens of artists but devotes separate chapters to the well-known artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran and contains extended commentaries on such painters as Samuel Seymour, Alfred Jacob Miller, Edward and Richard Kern, John Mix Stanley, and Thomas Worthington Whittredge. Since this study emphasizes landscape paintings, it omits extensive treatments of George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Charles Russell, who were more intrigued by western characters than by western settings.

Particularly noteworthy in this volume is the extensive research of Trenton and Hassrick. Although this book is in part a catalogue raisonne for a traveling exhibit of western landscapes that opened at the Whitney Gallery in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center at Cody, Wyoming, in early summer 1983, the volume transcends that genre. In addition to providing a pleasing pictorial survey of western landscape painting-54 color and 129 black-and-white plates-the authors display extraordinary talents as historical researchers. They make extensive use of general works by Ewers, Taft, and Goetzmann and of the book-length studies by Gordon Henricks, Thurman Wilkins, and Carol Clark on Bierstadt and Moran, and they also have utilized obscure printed sources, unpublished dissertations, and numerous manuscript sources in archives throughout the United States and Europe. No other general study of western art has been more thoroughly researched than this very appealing work. The footnotes and bibliography, which extend to more than sixty oversized pages, will be a handy bibliographical source for students and scholars interested in western art and cultural history.