Cowboy art corrals collectors: with an upsurge in the popularity of Western art, dealers of cowboy paintings, sculptures and collectibles are roping in revenues

Art Business News, Feb, 2003 by Laura Meyers

The Coeur d'Alene Art Auction in Reno, Nev., which concentrates on works created from 1840 to 1940, has the strongest sales in the Western art field, with figures that jumped from $8 million in 2000 to $14 million in 2001 (though they lagged back to $7,019,925 in 2002) and an aggregate of $60 million in the past five years. "We stick with good, historic pieces and artists who have solid track records at auction," explained Bob Drummond, co-owner of Coeur d'Alene. Top-selling Western artists in the 2002 auction were Maynard Dixon, Edgar Payne, Charles M. Russell, Birger Sandzen, Edgar S. Paxson, Tom Lovell, Philip R. Goodwin, Nicolai Fechin and E. William Gollings, whose 1925 oil painting "Montana Cowboy" was hammered down at $82,500.

Cowboy collectibles are just as hot. At last year's Cody Old West show and auction, held each June in Cody, Wyo., a pair of circa 1893 Buffalo Bill Wild West lithographic posters brought $25,200. An 1880s carved mechanical wooden cowgirl with its original paint sold for $17,000. And in Mesa, Ariz., last year, the High Noon auction, which features paintings and drawings from famed cowboy artists like Edward Borein, Will James and James Boren along with Hollywood Cowboy memorabilia and artifacts, set a record with the sale of Roy Rogers' saddle set for more than $700,000.

Accompanying the High Noon auction is a collectibles show with 250 dealers of Western art and artifacts, such as sterling silver saddles, guns toted by Hollywood film stars like Clint Eastwood, Wild West posters and movie posters (vintage B-movie Westerns command prices start at $75; a 1936 stone lithograph poster for the film Trail Dust has a retail price of $850). "Cowgirls, cowgirl spurs and dresses and photographs are one of the hottest areas of collecting right now," added Danny Verrier, Native American and Western art specialist at High Noon. "There's less of it surviving. But people are interested, and there's a new Cowgirls Hall of Fame [in Fort Worth, Texas], and that's a big thing."

The Romance of the Cowboy

Perhaps no time or place in history has so captured the popular imagination, in America and worldwide, as the taming of the Western frontier in the 19th century. A powerful and compelling dream of a prosperous life spurred thousands of adventurers and pioneers to move to the promised lands of the West. Their hopes and dreams, difficulties and triumphs, have been chronicled ever since in words and pictures.

"The idea of the West," observed Michael Duty, executive director of the National Center for American Western Art in Kerrville, Texas, "remains a powerful force in American culture. It is, for many Americans, our creation myth--the idea of picking up and discovering a New World and starting over. The lure of a new land is iconic and embodied in the idea of the West. A lot of Western art is pretty basic, depicting a hard job well done. And the figure of the cowboy does seem to encompass all of that. It strikes a resonant chord."

The true West was populated by a variety of emigrants, including fur trappers, prospectors, cavalrymen and assorted thieves and rustlers. But it was the open-range cowboy, of course, who fueled the popular imagination, then as now. The actual cowhand of the 1860s to 1880s was most commonly a low-paid hired hand who withstood unending hard work and frequently had a short life expectancy, said art historian J. Gray Sweeney in his book, Masterpieces of Western American Art. Yet, "there was something admirable about a man willing to drive hundreds of cantankerous creatures across miles of difficult terrain, risking exposure to the elements, rustlers and unfriendly Indians. His mystique Was further enhanced by the accouterments he adapted from the Hispanic vaquero--the broad-brimmed hat to protect him from the sun, the chaps that guarded his trousers from high grass and brush, and the spurs he used to engage his horse."