The Amon Carter Museum of American Art (also known as the Carter) is located in the cultural district of Fort Worth, Texas, United States. The museum's permanent collection features paintings, photography, sculpture, and works on paper by leading artists working in the United States and its North American territories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The greatest concentration of works falls into the period from the 1820s through the 1940s. Photographs, prints, and other works on paper produced up to the present day are also an area of strength in the museum's holdings.
The collection was built on portrayals of the Old West by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, artworks depicting nineteenth-century expansionism and settlement of the North American continent, and masterworks that are emblematic of major turning points in American art history. The "full spectrum" of American photography is documented by 45,000 exhibition-quality prints, dating from the earliest years of the medium to the present. A rotating selection of works from the permanent collection is on view year-round during regular museum hours, and several thousand of these works can be studied online using the Collection tab on the Carter's official website. Museum admission for all exhibits, including special exhibits, is free.
The Amon Carter Museum of American Art opened in 1961 as the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. The museum's original collection of more than 300 works of art by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell was assembled by Fort Worth newspaper publisher and philanthropist Amon G. Carter Sr. (1879–1955). Carter spent the last ten years of his life laying the legal, financial, and philosophical groundwork for the museum's creation.
Collection
Western art by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell
Over 400 works of art by Frederic Remington (1861–1909) and Charles M. Russell (1864–1926) form the Carter's core collection of art of the Old West. These holdings include drawings, illustrated letters, prints, oil paintings, sculptures, and watercolors produced by Remington and Russell during their lifetimes. More than sixty of the works by Remington and more than 250 of the works by Russell were purchased by the museum's namesake, Amon G. Carter Sr., over a twenty-year span beginning in 1935. Additions to Amon G. Carter's original holdings by museum curators have resulted in a collection that contains multiple examples of Remington's and Russell's best work at every stage of their respective careers.
Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell were America's best known and most influential western illustrators. Working from his New York studio except when traveling, Remington produced colorful and masculine images of life in the Old West that shaped public perceptions of the American frontier experience for an eastern audience eager for information. Montana resident Charles Russell, with his cowboy dress, laconic manner, and storytelling prowess, epitomized, in the early twentieth-century, the image of the Cowboy Artist in the eyes of the eastern press.Though neither artist had lived on the frontier at the height of America's westward expansion, their drawings, paintings, and sculptures were infused with the action and convincing realism of direct observation. Russell moved to Montana Territory in 1880, nine years before statehood, and had worked as a cowboy for more than a decade before beginning his career as a professional artist. Remington toured Montana in 1881, later owned a sheep ranch in Kansas, and had traversed Arizona Territory in 1886 as an illustrator for Harper's Weekly. These and other experiences enabled both artists to convincingly portray a vast variety of Old West subject matter drawing on real world experiences, historical evidence, and their artistic imaginations.
Noteworthy artworks in the Carter collection by Remington and Russell include: Frederic Remington, A Dash for the Timber (1889): A work that established Remington as a serious painter when it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1889. Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster (1895): Remington's first attempt to model in bronze and the work that started him on a long secondary career as a sculptor. Frederic Remington, The Fall of the Cowboy (1895): An evocation of the fading of the mythic cowboy of legend, anticipating Owen Wister's celebrated novel, The Virginian (1902). Charles M. Russell, Medicine Man (1908): A detailed portrait of a Blackfeet shaman, reflecting Russell's empathy with Native American culture. Charles M. Russell, Meat for Wild Men (1924): A bronze sculpture that evokes the "grand turmoil" resulting as a band of mounted hunters descends upon a herd of grazing buffalo.
Expeditionary art and depictions of Native American life
The Carter houses a wide selection of maps and artworks by European and American documentary artists who, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, traveled the North American continent in search of new sights and discoveries. Some of these artists worked independently, focusing on subjects or areas of the country of their own choosing. Others served as documentarians on expeditions of continental discovery sent out by the U. S. government or by European sponsors. In these roles, artists were uniquely positioned to record the topography, animal and plant life, and diverse Indian culture of America and its frontiers. Finding and collecting drawings, oil paintings, watercolors, and published lithographs by these European and American documentary artists was one of the museum's earliest goals. Documentary artists represented in the collection include John James Audubon (1785–1851), Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), George Catlin (1796–1872), Charles Deas (1818–1867), Seth Eastman (1808–1875), Edward Everett (1818–1903), Francis Blackwell Mayer (1827–1899), Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–1874), Peter Moran (1841–1914), Thomas Moran (1837–1926), Peter Rindisbacher (1806–1834), John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), William Guy Wall (1792–after 1864), Carl Wimar (1828–1862), and others.
Landscape paintings and coastal scenes
The Hudson River School, one of the critical movements in nineteenth-century American landscape painting, is an important focus of the Carter collection. Two major oils by Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and one by Cole's protégé Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) anchor the museum's holdings of signature Hudson River School paintings. The Narrows from Staten Island (1866–68), a panoramic depiction of Staten Island and New York Harbor by Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823–1900), is a notable example of the Hudson River School's preoccupation with scenery along the Hudson River Valley and surrounding area.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement, a British movement that was briefly influential among some artists of the Hudson River School in the mid-nineteenth century, is exemplified in Woodland Glade (1860) by William Trost Richards (1833–1905) and Hudson River, Above Catskill (1865) by Charles Herbert Moore (1840–1930). The Moore painting depicts an identifiable portion of the Hudson River adjacent to the home of Thomas Cole, making it likely that the painting was intended as a tribute to Cole.
Hudson River School paintings that reflect the influence of Luminism are also found in the Carter collection. These include works by Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880), Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), John Frederick Kensett (1816–1872), and Fitz Henry Lane (1804–1865). Given its "dark, brooding mystery," the painting by Heade, Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay (1868), is considered by many observers to be the artist's masterpiece.
Other Hudson River School artists represented in the collection by major oil paintings are Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821–1872), David Johnson (1827–1908), and Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910). William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900) is represented by a preliminary study of rocky coastline along Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.
The influence of the Hudson River School and Luminism was focused on a western United States location about 1870 when Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) produced Sunrise, Yosemite Valley. This grandiose example of the artist's work was completed after Bierstadt's third trip to the American west. It was added to the Carter collection in 1966. Another Hudson River School painter who headed west was Thomas Moran (1837–1926). Moran, famous for his paintings of the Yellowstone region of Wyoming, is represented in the Carter collection by his 1874 oil Cliffs of Green River.
Figure paintings, portraits, and images of everyday life
Nineteenth-century figure paintings, portraits, and genre pictures (portrayals of everyday life) represent an important chapter in the history of American art development, and several examples of these types of paintings are found in the Carter collection. Swimming (1885) by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) is one of the best-known realist figure paintings in the history of American art. A summation of Eakins' painting technique and belief system, Swimming was acquired for the Carter collection in 1990. Crossing the Pasture (1871–72) by Winslow Homer (acquired 1976) combines the artist's skills as a figure painter with his gift for storytelling to create a charming image of rural New York life.
Indian Group (1845) by Charles Deas (1818–1867) explores the physical appearance of Deas' Native American subjects and the perils associated with their nomadic lifestyle. The Potter (1889) by George de Forest Brush (1855–1941) is another example in the Carter collection of an artist's exacting and nuanced method of depicting an indigenous American sitter. Attention Company! (1878) by William M. Harnett (1848–1892) is the only known figural composition by this American master of trompe-l'œil ("fool the eye") painting.
A major historical genre painting by William T. Ranney (1813–1857) is in the Carter collection. Ranney's Marion Crossing the Pedee (1850) exhibits the artist's great skill as a figure painter and use of that skill to entertain and educate his nineteenth-century audience. Notable genre paintings by Conrad Wise Chapman (1842–1910), Francis William Edmonds (1806–1863), Thomas Hovenden (1840–1895), and Eastman Johnson (1824–1906) are also housed in the Carter collection.
Portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) is represented in the museum's collection by formal portraits of two American subjects, Alice Vanderbilt Shepard (1888), and Edwin Booth (1890).
Still-life paintings and sculpture
Trompe-l'œil ("fool the eye") paintings and classic still-life paintings make up a prominent component of the Carter collection. Ease (1887) by William M. Harnett (1848–1892) is a large and eloquent example of the trompe-l'œil genre and one that amply demonstrates the allure of Harnett's trompe-l'œil illusions for his nineteenth-century patrons. John Frederick Peto (1854–1907), a William Harnett contemporary who worked in relative obscurity, is represented in the collection by two highly accomplished trompe-l'œil compositions, Lamps of Other Days (1888) and A Closet Door (1904–06). Other trompe-l'œil paintings in the Carter collection were created by De Scott Evans (1847–1898) and John Haberle (1853–1933).
America's first recognized still-life painter, Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825), is represented in the Carter collection by an 1813 composition Peaches and Grapes in a Chinese Export Basket. Other classic American still lifes featuring fruit or flowers include Wrapped Oranges (1889) by William J. McCloskey (1859–1941) and Abundance (after 1848) by Severin Roesen (1815–after 1872).