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New Collectors Seeking Old Stories About America Are Reshaping the Market for Western Art

Nostalgia for a romanticized past—"the sense back then of 'manifest destiny,'" according to Sotheby's Stefany Morris—is a significant driver of recent growth in this category.

When one says ‘Western,’ John Wayne and Roy Rogers shoot-em-up films, painted and sculpted images of cowboys and Indians and beach-reading by Zane Grey, Larry Mcmurtry and Louis L'Amour likely come to mind. But is this a realistic or limited understanding of what Western art actually is? Tylee Abbott, head of the American Art department at Christie's and also a specialist in Western art, takes a deep breath before answering the question. “Both,” he tells Observer. “I think it’s limited in that Western Art predated much of that era of the dime-store novel and goes back to early explorer artists in the early and mid-19th Century. It also includes landscapes that stem from the Hudson River School to encompass the work of Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, among other artists. And then it goes forward all the way to today’s time, where it includes, yes, cowboys and Indians, but also landscape again. There’s also an amazing tradition of wildlife painting that would be a subgenre, as well.”

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Western Art (capital W, capital A) is a big category that at the largest auction houses—Bonhams, Christie’s, Heritage Auctions and Sotheby's—only encompasses two- and three-dimensional artworks and at more regional auctioneers and galleries is expanded to include artifacts, such as saddles, guns, horse bridles, spurs, hats, chaps and other paraphernalia. At Christie’s, Abbott said, that latter area “would more typically be considered memorabilia or Americana or something like that.”

On the fine art side, there is a mix of imagery. Maynard Dixon’s 1936-45 Land Westward, which sold at Bonhams for $350,312 in 2021, is essentially a landscape painting that includes, in the far-off foreground, a man on horseback slowly herding a group of horses. Thomas Moran’s 1913 landscape Index Peak, Yellowstone, Wyoming, which sold at Christie’s in 2020 for $1,350,000, doesn’t have a single person in it, just mountain peaks following mountain peaks seemingly forever. Both are odes to the grandeur and expansiveness of the American frontier.

Still, that Thomas Moran painting was part of a sale of the T. Boone Pickens art collection that also included images of Native tribesmen on the warpath, attacking circled wagons or a stagecoach, while others depicted cowboys herding cattle, taming a bronco, leading a charge........

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