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

By the 1890s, the heyday of the cowboy was over. The railroads had traversed the country, eliminating the need for long cattle drives and thus the cowboy. But rather than fading into the sunset, the idea of the cowboy, said Sweeney, "flourished, living on as a national icon in art, literature, film and television."

The figure of the cowboy became the West's protagonist, a romantic and daring character who loved the outdoors, a self-reliant individualist with a virtuous sense of fair play. By the turn of the century, particularly as portrayed in Remington's popular art, the cowboy had emerged as the embodiment of freedom and the unfettered, wide-open spaces of the West. (Unlike New York illustrator Remington, the self-taught artist Russell was a genuine Montana cowboy. His works often depict "cowboy fun," portraying reckless, rough-and-ready fellas drinking and hell-raising after a hard day's work.)

For most of the traditional Western art paintings and sculptures, the region and the era have been depicted in "a romanticized view," said Heidi Theios, gallery director at Nicholas Fine Art in Billings, Mont. That is one reason, she speculated, that "a lot of Western art is still not accepted at all in Eastern circles and with critics. But America is such a young country, and this is a true American art."

There has always been a critical conflict in "old school" Western genre art. On one hand, as Theios observed, Western artists depict the myth and romance of the West and seldom its harsh truths. "The West of the imagination has always been a fairly cleaned-up version," added Duty. The content and implied narration of the historic works supported the notion of America's Manifest Destiny and the idea that Native Americans were invariably bad, while settlers (the White Man) were invariably good.

At the same time, Western artists are exacting and relentless in their pursuit of historical verisimilitude. "These guys try hard to be accurate in their depictions," noted Bill Rey, owner of Claggett/Rey Gallery in Vail, Colo. Clark of Toh-Atin agreed. "They do strive for absolute authenticity," she said. The artists talk about it a lot: Would that cowboy in 1851 have a holster that looks like that? Would he use a tie-down like that?" A cowboy has to have the right leggings, and the right tack, for the era in which he lived. "You've got to know when they wore shotgun chaps and when they wore batwing chaps," said artist Steven Lang. "You can't use batwing chaps on an 1850s cowboy. I'm trying to paint for the two percent of people who know that."

Indeed, when the four founding members (Joe Beeler, Charlie Dye, John Hampton and George Phippen) of what became Cowboy Artists of America first met in Sedona, Ariz., in 1963 to establish the association, they set as their mission "to ensure authentic representation of the life in the West, as it was and is." And although today's contemporary cowboy artist may choose to depict contemporary ranch life, others still focus on the Old West, haunting libraries and archives for their research, and building up personal collections of photographs, Western artifacts and ephemera to help guarantee that their portrayals are accurate.