Art: THE WAY WEST

SELDOM have painters had a broader and more sweeping theme than the winning of the West, the great American epic of the 19th century. Their canvas was the whole reach from the Mississippi delta swamps to the frozen peaks of the Rockies. Most of the adventurous artists who rode west with military parties and wagon trains are relative unknowns. But their work, brought together by the St. Louis City Art Museum’s Director Perry T. Rathbone to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, makes a vibrant, graphic history of a great age (see color pages).

George Catlin was the first artist to replace the conventional picture of the Indian (usually James Fenimore Coopers noble savage, in Mohawk dress) with authentic Plains Indians (TIME, June 7), presented with authentic American showmanship. For an English tour of his 600-odd paintings, Artist Catlin used genuine Indians, who gave point to his lectures by posing in tableaux, wowed the early Victorians with their scalp-tingling war whoops.

Ironically, even the earliest painters of the West were recording an already vanishing era. The bustling scene of the stockaded fur-trading post at Fort Laramie was painted by Alfred Jacob Miller in 1837, when the Rocky Mountain fur trade had already passed its peak. Paris-trained Miller’s paintings of a fur trappers’ rendezvous, done with blue-tinted mountains in the romantic manner of Delacroix, are the only surviving pictorial records of the mountain men’s great annual blowouts of drinking, fighting, “squaw doin’s” and trading. The Swiss painter Charles Bodmer, first artist to travel up the Missouri past the Yellowstone, included in his careful watercolors of the fierce Plains warriors, dramatic sketches of other tribesmen already demoralized and debauched by drink, decaying on the outskirts of the white man’s settlements.

For all the artists, the immensity of the new West was an overwhelming experience. One German-trained painter, Albert Bierstadt, who accompanied General F. W. Lander’s surveying expedition to Oregon in 1858, is said to have sketched a spectacular formation in the Rockies, then refused to paint it, explaining in despair: “Few people would believe they are real rocks.” Painters also found their ingenuity taxed by the great spaces and the harsh light of the West. Lacking an adequate technique for handling light, they often fell back on filling their canvases with lurid sunsets, fire, even rainbows, to give the impact of the West’s grandeur. How effective this stratagem can be is shown by Charles Wimar, an immigrant German boy whose murals in the St. Louis Courthouse were the first west of the Mississippi. By painting straight into a sunset, he gave his painting a superb sense of the loneliness of an early settler’s sod hut, lost in a distance that dwarfed all things human.

Most artists went to the West as strangers. The earliest first-rate American artist to whom the new West was a natural environment was George Caleb Bingham, a self-taught painter who grew up in Missouri. Bingham’s Osage warrior lying in ambush is tense testimony to the wagoner’s haunting knowledge that Indian eyes were always on him. But Bingham’s masterpieces are the superbly drawn scenes of settled frontier life, electioneering, shooting competitions and riverboat life. Painted in the 1840s and 1850s, they already point to the days when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn will think of Injun Joe as an outcast, when the streets will be lined with whitewashed fences.