Visions of the American West
CHAPTER 5: Kicking up dust
Chapters
If they weren’t painting craggy mountains or wide–open fields, artists in the AmericanWest were most likely trying to capture the athleticism of animals. The Charge [A Cavalry Scrap] by Frederic Sackrider Remington is an apt example: though the staggering canvas depicts a horde of horsemen, the horses themselves are the clear stars of the show. Solon H. Borglum, too, conveyed his reverence for western fauna by distilling the balletic art of the lasso in his bronze sculpture, Lassoing Wild Horses. Other artists, such as Tom Lea and Charles Marion Russell, clearly relished the muscular silhouettes of their majestic subjects in paintings such as The Lead Steer and Git ‘Em Out of There.
Image credit:
William Gilbert Gaul
The Land of the Free, circa 1900 (detail)
Oil on canvas
The Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
Gift of C.R. Smith, 1976