Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays by Ron Tyler (review)

Ron Tyler's career as a student of western American art and nineteenth-century American printing has earned him an enviable scholarly reputation. He is known for his deep research and rigorous, close analyses. He has tackled a range of artists and printmakers and made substantial contributions to the literature in books and essays that span more than forty years. This collection of eight of his essays, all revised since their first publications and sumptuously produced, covers artists as relatively obscure as Louis Choris and Alfred E. Mathews and as well known as Karl Bodmer, Alfred Jacob Miller, John James Audubon, George Caleb Bingham, and Frederic Remington.

Tyler's chapter on Choris opens this collection with the visual record of a Russian circumnavigation of the globe from 1818 to 1820, concentrating on Choris's original watercolors and the lithographs that illustrated his publication, from 1820 to 1822, of Voyage pittoresque autour du monde, showing the landscape and natives of California and Hawaii. The chapter serves as a reminder that western art, like American western history, has followed an east to west imperative, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean at the expense of the earlier south to north thrust of Spanish empire and the maritime explorations of the Pacific by Spain, Great Britain, and Russia, which produced a record of Indigenous cultures on the West Coast before overland explorations ever reached what was considered the Far West.

All of Tyler's essays are informative and make good reading, but one stands out for me, the thematic chapter "'I Am Tired of All This Thing Called Science': Illustrated Government Publications Related to the American West, 1843–1863." This inventory establishes the paramount role of government patronage not only for artists, but also for American printers. Miller and Bodmer may have accompanied private patrons, and George Catlin, despite his persistent efforts to secure government patronage, had to rely on his own initiative when he ventured up the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and onto the Southern Plains to paint Indians in the 1830s. In that respect, Catlin anticipated the iconic figure in frontier mythology, the rugged, self-sufficient individual. But government-sponsored expeditionary artists provided the bulk of widely disseminated images of the distant western territories in the years before the Civil War. Tyler's meticulous reconstruction of their partnerships with the government establishes his premise that visual documents are as valuable as written documents in understanding the past, a premise that guided the great historian of western exploration William H. Goetzmann, to whom Tyler dedicates this volume.

Tyler's discussion of George Caleb Bingham, quoting freely from contemporary reviews of his major paintings, acknowledges the issue of long-held eastern prejudices about western art. It is an art defined by its regional subject matter, of course. But because Bingham lived in Missouri, it is hard not to think of another St. Louis artist, Charles M. Russell, who would make Montana his home in 1880. There he discovered cowboys, just as Bingham had discovered fur trappers and river men situated at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in the 1840s. Their subjects were types––footloose, carefree young men who pushed out of the urban centers like St. Louis to live the frontier dream. "The western boatmen are a peculiar class in most of their habits, dress and manners," the Daily Missouri Republican observed in 1847 (228). The same characterization could have been applied just as readily to Russell (or Remington) cowboys forty years later. Tellingly, Tyler contrasts the critical reception accorded Bingham's work in Missouri, where it was praised as a product of native genius, and in the East, where critics grumbled about the vulgarity of his subject matter and the crudity of his treatment of it––a regional divide that pertains to this day where western art is concerned.

This fine book, published in the Charles M. Russell Center Series on Art and Photography of the American West, pays fitting...