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

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An oil painting of a group of Native American riders on horseback gathered in a sunlit grassland beneath a dramatic cloudy sky.

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.”

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.

A landscape painting of a broad desert plain with layered pink and blue mountains beneath a pale blue-and-white sky.

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 against hostile natives or heading out in a posse to capture some outlaws—as though they were created as storyboards for a Tom Mix movie. The stereotypes just keep intruding.

Aaron Bastian, director of fine art at Bonhams in San Francisco, argues that “the Western Art category includes art made in or about the historic West, the contemporary West and the imagined West.” He noted that artworks in this category “run the gamut from realistic to romanticized. Some are decidedly sentimental, while others are quite graphic. Western art offers no shortage of charming images of children, but it also can contain significant depictions of conflict, suffering and violence.”

In the category of historic West, Thomas Moran (1837-1926) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), both Hudson River School artists, were Easterners who traveled out west with their paints, canvases and brushes to depict (perhaps romantically) what they saw for an audience back home that was eager to learn what their young nation actually looked like. For these and other artists, their work represented a call to preserve the pristine nature of this largely uninhabited land.

On the other hand, Howard Terpning (b. 1927), who grew up in the Midwest, worked for years as a commercial artist in Connecticut before moving permanently to Arizona, made a career out of portraying the 19th-century world of cowboys and Indians, based partially on historical research and partly on his imagination. His 1982 painting, Coffee Coolers Meet the Hostiles, which imagines a meeting of Native Americans from a reservation (known pejoratively as “coffee coolers” for their appreciation of white man customs) and Native Americans who refused to live on reservations (the “hostiles”), is the most expensive work in the Western Art category that Bonhams has yet sold, achieving $1,392,500 in 2019.

A watercolor painting of a cowboy on horseback galloping across a dusty plain while roping a steer being dragged behind him.

Terpning certainly was not alone in presenting the cowboy mythology. C.M. (Charles Marion) Russell (1864-1926) was a highly prolific painter of cowboys, as well as Native American tribesmen in full headdresses on horseback, and a 1919 painting by the artist, At the End of the Rope, sold at John Moran Auctioneers in Monrovia, California for $285,750 at an Art of the American West sale in 2025. Yet another star is Frederic Remington (1861-1909), a painter and sculptor of cowboys, Indians and cavalry troopers, all in quite active and rugged poses, who is perhaps the most sought-after artist in this category, with works selling well over $1 million and sometimes over $10 million. The record for a work by the artist was set earlier this year when Coming to the Call sold for $13,285,000.

Terpning, C.M. Russell and Remington are the undisputed stars of this category, but there are many other artists who depicted the world of the southwestern U.S. as they saw or imagined it, such as Walter Ufer (1876-1936), Ed Mell (1942-2024), Joseph Henry Sharp (1869-1953) and W.R. (William Robinson) Leigh (1866-1955). Leigh’s 40″ x 60″ 1932 painting of figures around a campfire, Home Sweet Home, set a record price for Leigh’s work of $1,195,000 when it sold to energy industry billionaire William I. Koch at Heritage Auctions in 2011. That painting, more recently, was sold at Christie’s in January as part of the Koch collection, where it underperformed. (Earlier this year, a two-part sale of the collector’s holdings at Christie’s, Visions of the West: The William I. Koch Collection, shattered expectations, setting five new artist records and making auction history by more than tripling the previous high for a single-owner Western art collection with a $84,122,305 total.)

Western Art tells a story about America, sometimes highlighting the conquest of the west or its natural beauty or the wildlife found in the open spaces or the dignity of the declining numbers of Native tribesmen that settlers encountered. Take your pick or, like T. Boone Pickens, take some of everything. “For a lot of collectors, especially with the 250th anniversary of American independence, this is their vision of American history, of what American life was like,” Stefany Morris, senior vice president and head of American art at Sotheby’s, tells Observer. The market for Western Art is growing, she adds, particularly among a younger group of buyers—in their 40s and 50s—who find Western Art more affordable than contemporary art and have been intrigued by recent TV Westerns, such as Yellowstone and 1883 and Marshals. “The 250th is a pivotal movement, and it is not disingenuous to say that there is a feeling of pride in our country and a lot of focus on that history.”

Nostalgia for an often-romanticized past—”the sense back then of ‘manifest destiny,'” Morris says—is a driver of the growth in the number of buyers of Western Art. More buyers also help push up the prices. “The more action in the art, the more valuable,” according to Alissa Ford, vice president in charge of Western Art at Heritage Auctions. “A lot of these artists came out of an illustration background, and they knew the value of storytelling.” Many buyers of Western Art “want their collections to tell a Western story,” associating that story with being an American. “What is our identity? To someone overseas, would that person recognize a Milton Avery painting as American? But a cowboys-and-Indians painting people would recognize immediately as being American.”

A painting of a group of Native American riders traveling on horseback across an expansive Western landscape at sunset, some carrying long lances.

She defines Western Art as the work of “any artist who painted in the west or who depicted Western subject matter.” There are exceptions, of course, such as artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose paintings of the southwest tend to be sold in American art sales, or Native American artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, whose works are more likely to be placed in sales of Native American art. Still, the net that Western Art casts is broad, and a lot of it is not even fine art.

Among the most sought-after objects at Lusher Fine Art & Auctions in Santa Fe, New Mexico are saddles and bridles, says owner Chris Lusher. “Edward H. Bohlin saddles are some of the most prized possessions of a Western art collection, with some of his parade saddles being sold for well over $100,000.” Bohlin (1895-1980) referred to himself as “saddle maker to the stars,” as his highly decorated saddles were used in movies starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and he also created what are called “parade” saddles that were used in the annual Rose Bowl parade. “Affluent collectors might ride them in a parade, but, mostly, people don’t ride on them but just put them in their living rooms for show.” Other objects of interest to Western Art collectors are what are called “prison bridles,” metal and naturally dyed braided horsehair bridles for horses that were produced in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries at various western prisons, particularly the Deer Lodge Prison in Montana, the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla and the Yuma Territorial Prison in Arizona. Prison bridles “is a hot area of the market right now with prices being realized from $5,000 to $20,000, depending on workmanship, color and which prison the bridle came from,” Lusher explains.

Buyers of Western Art are diverse; some are full-time residents of the southwest while others are “vacationers who have come here and want a reminder of what they visited,” Stuart Johnson, owner of Settlers West Galleries in Tucson, Arizona, tells Observer. Others primarily live in major cities on one of the coasts but “have a second home in, say, Jackson Hole that they want to decorate with Western Art,” according to Katherine Halligan, director of fine art at John Moran Auctioneers. “The second home phenomenon is pretty big.”