This illustrated catalog of Thomas Moran's field sketches includes an interpretive essay tracing the artist's seventy-year career in the field; a chronological, stylistic, and geographical survey of his fieldwork; an illustrated checklist of the 1080 sketches in public collections.
Moran is best known for his work in the American West during the post-Civil War expansion, particularly in what would become Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite national parks. Yet this virtuoso painter and draftsman also traveled in search of inspiration in Pennsylvania, New York's Long Island, Florida, Wisconsin, Mexico, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Italy, returning repeatedly to favorite subjects. An almost compulsive desire to sketch refined his innate skill as one of America's finest landscape artists.
Most of Moran's known field sketches are reproduced here. As described in the introduction, "their range encompasses summary contour drawings of the spectacular topography of the American West, luminous watercolors that simultaneously fix local color and evoke the artist's rapturous response to the natural world, and fully realized works that nevertheless preserve the intensity of Moran's firsthand experience of his plein air subjects."
No serious formal study of Thomas Moran can be made without reference to this volume.

Charles Deas (1818-67), an enigmatic figure on the edge of mainstream artistic circles in mid-nineteenth-century New York, went west to explore new opportunities and subjects in 1840. From his adopted hometown of St. Louis, Deas sent his iconic paintings of fur trappers and Indians back east for exhibition and sale, briefly winning the recognition that had earlier eluded him.

This handsome volume--featuring more than 150 illustrations, 70 in color--is the first book exclusively devoted to Deas. In two major essays, Carol Clark presents Deas's haunting biography and complex art--works that embodied Americans' uncertainty about the future of their rapidly expanding nation, especially in the contested spaces of the West. Ranging from Indian genre scenes to more violent and bizarre themes drawn from literature and his own imagination, Deas's images reverberate with the racial tensions and cut-throat economic competition of the period. Three additional essayists examine the historical, political, and social context of Deas's art and discuss in detail two of his major paintings, "Walking the Chalk and Long Jakes, "the Rocky Mountain Man.""

The volume also includes Clark's catalogue of Deas's paintings, watercolors, and drawings--the most extensive recovery and documentation to date of the work of this important but little-known artist. "Charles Deas and 1840s America" will constitute the definitive reference on the painter for years to come.

In the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, Charles M. Russell depicted the American West in a fresh, personal, and deeply moving way. To this day, Russell is celebrated for his paintings and sculptures of cowboys at work and play, his sensitive portrayals of American Indians, and his superlative representations of landscape and wildlife. This handsome book--a companion volume to the acclaimed "Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonne," edited by B. Byron Price--showcases many of the artist's best-known works and chronicles the sources and evolution of his style.

Here are iconic images that have defined the West in the popular imagination for more than a century. The volume boasts reproductions, most in full color, of more than 150 of Russell's finest works in oil, bronze, and mixed media. Select examples of his drawings, watercolors, and illustrated letters as well as archival photographs place Russell's paintings and sculpture in historic and artistic context.

This sumptuous volume is an essential addition to the library of every aficionado of American western art. In its pages readers will discover the work of a man whose ideal vision of the American experience continues to stir the spirit nearly a century after his death.

In 2010, the Anschutz Collection became the American Museum of Western Art--The Anschutz Collection, a public museum." Painters and the American West, Volume II "is a companion and sequel to the award-winning "Painters and the American West: The Anschutz Collection, "published in 2000. The present volume includes the finest works featured in the earlier book, along with major recent acquisitions by Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Deas, William Ranney, Emanuel Leutze, Thomas Eakins, Thomas Anshutz, Henry Farny, N. C. Wyeth, William Herbert "Buck" Dunton, Edward Hopper, and many others.
In the foreword to this book, Sarah Hunt, director of the museum, tells the story of the Anschutz Collection's transition from a closely held treasure to an educational and esthetic resource for Denver and western art enthusiasts everywhere. In the book's introductory essay, distinguished scholar and curator John Wilmerding provides cultural and literary context for the museum's holdings, which include exemplary works by virtually every significant painter of the American West from the 1820s through the mid-twentieth century. Historical essays by acclaimed historian James P. Ronda introduce the six chapters of the book, setting the stage for in-depth examinations of individual masterworks by Joan Carpenter Troccoli.
Scholars have brought new insight to western American art in the past decade, and the European view of the westering experience as a defining characteristic of American history and culture is beginning to take hold among art historians on this side of the Atlantic. Western American art is shedding its outsider status and assuming its rightful place as an integral component of the history of American art--and American life. The 150 masterful images from over a century of painting that are showcased in this book expand our understanding of the place of the American West in the story of humankind.

Charles M. Russell has long been recognized for his action-packed paintings, drawings, and sculpture of cowboys, fur trappers, Native American buffalo hunters and warriors, and other heroes of the Old West. Russell's best-known works capture the excitement and deadly risk of men battling nature and one another in a majestic landscape of mountains and plains. Less well known are Russell's hundreds of depictions of western women. As renowned author and art historian Ginger K. Renner observed thirty-five years ago, no other artist of the West devoted more of his time and talent to the portrayal of women. But few have followed Renner's lead - until now. Lavishly illustrated with full-color illustrations, Charles M. Russell: The Women in His Life and Art presents groundbreaking essays essential to understanding the role of western women in Russell's art. This volume is both a tribute to the women who nurtured Russell's artistic development and a landmark in the study of the role of women in a genre all too often identified almost exclusively with a masculine world. The catalogue essays examine the exhibition's theme from four unique perspectives. Joan Carpenter Troccoli provides an over view of the works in the exhibition and the social, cultural, and personal values that influenced them. Emily Crawford Wilson explores Russell's interest in the feminine ideal, tying it to wider artistic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jennifer Bottomly-O'looney describes Russell's friendship with Ben and Lela Roberts, who introduced the artist to Nancy Cooper, the woman who would become his wife and indispensable business partner. Thomas A. Petrie employs extended excerpts from Nancy's unpublished biographical memoir to illuminate the Russells' marriage, a relationship sustained by affection and mutual respect, as well as shrewd creative and marketing decisions.