Expedition, legend, character: a specialist’s view on the art of the American West

What are the qualities that define the American West? ‘Self-reliance, independence, controlling your own destiny,’ says William I. Koch. On 20 and 21 January, Christie’s will present Visions of the West: The William I. Koch Collection Evening and Day Sales, two landmark sales drawn from the collection of the eponymous industrialist, scientist and winner of the America’s Cup. Bringing together masterworks by Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell and their contemporaries, the collection reflects the very best of the artists who shaped the visuals — and values — that came to define the culture and mythos of the American West.

Those ideals run through the imagery of Western art that has long captivated many, including Tylee Abbott, Christie’s Head of American Art. His professional stewardship of the field is informed by a lifelong personal connection to the West. In the reflections that follow, Abbott considers how Western art has documented these values and carried them forward, shaping American culture and storytelling across generations.

Tylee Abbott: I was born in Philadelphia, but my relationship with the West started early. From the time I was two years old, my brothers and I spent our summers at a dude ranch near Cody, Wyoming. We were immersed in the Western landscape, exposed to cowboys, fully engaged in cowboy play ourselves, and steeped in a place that actively lives its Western identity.

A descendant and namesake of the Western painter William Tylee Ranney, I was also exposed to his imagery of the American frontier at a young age. Through that connection, my family became deeply involved with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and I grew up learning by osmosis — through art, through that institution and through the people who shaped this field.

Eventually my parents bought a ranch in Montana, and summers stretched into months working alongside people who might be considered cowboys through and through. The quality of character in those places was formative. It shaped who we became. That value system — hard work, responsibility, loyalty, self-reliance — is what I find so compelling about the American West. These images have documented those values and distributed them throughout our culture for centuries.

TA: The desire to explore uncharted places is fundamentally human, and it’s central to the history of the American West. There’s always been an interest in what’s over the horizon — from the moment Lewis and Clark set out west to understand this land, through to the present day. We’re still seeing migration into the West.

Many 19th-century explorer-artists were deeply engaged in this process, encountering the land, the people who lived there, including Native cultures. Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Jacob Miller, and, on a personal level, Ranney, were Contemporary artists — with a capital C. They were the Andy Warhols of their era, returning east to exhibit in the foremost national exhibitions. They fed an audience fascinated by the mysteries of the unknown.

TA: Few genres are as bound to place as the Western, whose distinctive nature emerges from a landscape that shaped both its cultures and its people. From the Grand Canyon to Glacier National Park, the American West is uniquely varied. Yellowstone, that curious, bubbling, almost infernal place, was a point of enormous fascination in the 19th century. While the landscapes of the West were extraordinarily beautiful, they were also demanding, and in many cases not particularly conducive to human existence.

The artists who ventured west did their best to translate their encounters with nature. From the arid expanses of Henry F. Farny’s  canyon lands to Bierstadt’s depictions of Yosemite Valley’s extraordinary monumental rock formations, these artists were — and remain — the most compelling interpreters of the Western landscape. The sense of awe they sought to instill in their viewers carries on today.

TA: These images endure because they’re so universal. They’re human. They speak to the positive attributes we associate with humanity. Remington was famous for portraying what he called “men with the bark on” — figures stripped to purpose, resolve, and necessity — while Charles Marion Russell documented this world in a more romantic and reverential way. Russell spent significant time amongst Native Americans at different points of his career, learning their ways firsthand. In those works, he paid homage both to their humanity and nobility.

Again and again, these artists returned to the people navigating life in the West. They were carving a way of life out of a rugged natural world. That process didn’t just produce hardy individuals; it defined value systems. Community, faith, loyalty, and valor became essential for survival.

TA: The individuals documenting the West were leading artists of their time, with fully formed personas and mythos. Many worked in New York, inviting people into their studios, with audiences and admirers not unlike those who flocked to Warhol’s Factory in the second half of the 20th century. People often imagine these artworks being made in isolation, but the reality was far more complex. Remington, Frank Tenney Johnson, and William Robinson Leigh were all academically trained, exhibited at the most important American institutions and maintained studios back East, filled with Native American objects, leather, and cowboy gear collected on their travels. They were actively engaging in the mythology of the West even as they reproduced and disseminated it.

Russell, by contrast, chose to live in Montana, working from within the culture he depicted. Self-taught and less engaged with the mainstream, he lagged somewhat behind Remington in recognition for decades. Over the last 50 years, however, his reputation has grown dramatically. People have come to recognize how widely his imagery circulated, how deeply he was committed to the people of the West and his influence on early Western films. Today expanding economies in the Mountain West and Russell’s lasting association as “one of our own” have only made his work more greatly appreciated.

TA: There was also a commercial ecosystem that drove Remington and Russell’s initial success in their day. Of course, the story of an artist’s success is rarely just about the artist. What’s interesting for these two is how much their wives were key forces in the business side of their art. For Remington, his wife, Eva, flourished after the artist’s death, becoming the steward of his legacy and overseeing his sculptural output with real rigor and care.

Russell’s wife, Nancy, was deeply involved in Russell’s business throughout — working with galleries and foundries, managing the commercial side of his career, and allowing him the space to be artistically productive. That kind of independence and resolve reflects the spirit of the West as much as the artists and their output.

TA: At a time before film or television, these artists’ work provided both entertainment and education to a wide audience. From Remington and Leigh through the golden age of American illustration and N.C. Wyeth, their images appeared in books and periodicals, shaping our vision of the West. Alongside writers, they were the storytellers of their era, responsible for how the narrative of the nation was consumed. That lineage stretches back to early frontier literature — notably The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper — and across the Atlantic. Europe has long been fascinated with the American West, shaped in part by writers like Karl May, whose novels framed frontier life around character rather than individual characters.

By the time Western cinema emerged, the narratives were already fully formed and the imagery firmly established; film was simply a new medium. More enduring than the genre itself are the values — risk, adventure, and moral codes — expressed through a familiar visual language: the lone gunslinger, the high-noon standoff, the desolate and unforgiving landscape, the social theater of the saloon. Today, these narratives continue to extend so naturally into modern epics like Star Wars and Avatar. In that sense, the paintings are the source material, and American cultural storytelling grows from them.