Western American art — the paintings and bronzes that celebrate the cowboy, the frontier landscape, and the life of the open range — is one of the most commercially robust categories in the American art market. The major Western art auctions consistently set records. The best galleries in the genre maintain inventory that spans from Frederic Remington's contemporaries to living painters of significant national reputations. Here's where to find the best of it.
What Is Western Art?
The category is broad and contested. At its historical core: the 19th-century artists who accompanied survey expeditions and cavalry campaigns into the West — Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin — and the early 20th-century painters who romanticized the cowboy and ranch life. The Taos Society of Artists sits at the border between Western and Modernist, using Western subject matter with increasingly sophisticated formal approaches. Contemporary Western art extends the tradition into new materials and sensibilities while maintaining the subject matter.
Trailside Galleries, Scottsdale
Trailside Galleries in Scottsdale is one of the most respected Western art galleries in the country — a consistent destination for collectors who want traditional and contemporary Western painting and sculpture at museum quality. The inventory runs from oil paintings of horses and cowboys to monumental bronzes, all executed at a technical level that demands serious attention.
Nedra Matteucci Galleries, Santa Fe
Nedra Matteucci Galleries occupies the center of the market where Western art meets Taos and Santa Fe School Modernism. The sculpture garden is one of the finest in the Southwest, and the interior galleries provide an authoritative survey of the American plein-air and Impressionist tradition as it played out in the Mountain West.
Settlers West Galleries, Tucson
Settlers West Galleries focuses on traditional Western American painting and sculpture with a strong roster of contemporary artists working in the realist idiom. The annual Tucson show in November is one of the most important Western art events in the Southwest.
Medicine Man Gallery, Scottsdale
Medicine Man Gallery bridges Western art and Native American art — an unusual combination that makes it a singular resource for collectors interested in the relationship between frontier and indigenous visual cultures. The historical inventory here is extraordinary.
Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale
Legacy Gallery presents both historical and contemporary Western art with an emphasis on the plein-air landscape tradition — painters who work directly in front of the subject in the manner of the 19th-century academy, producing work that is simultaneously traditional in method and contemporary in execution.