The Western Art of William R. Leigh Part I

As summer starts and we approach July 4^th, I wanted to touch upon the western art of William R. Leigh. 

There is a mistaken assumption that great art is a strictly European achievement.  However, many of the finest artists of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were here in the United States.  Not just Impressionists and Ash Can artists, but great masters who made as their subject the opening of the American West.

One of the artists overlooked in our veneration of the likes of Charles Russell (1864-1926) and Frederic Remington (1861-1909), is William Robinson Leigh (1866 –1955).  The three men were contemporaries, but Leigh managed to outlive the other two by some 30 years or more.  Like Russell, he was something of a wanderer, and made trips to the American West in search of subjects to paint.  While there, he made countless oil color studies that he brought back with him to his New York studio to further develop as full-scale pictures.  (Like another Western artist we have looked at, Charles Shreyvogel, most of his creations were executed here on the East Coast.)  Leigh was also something of a global explorer, going with the great taxidermist and sculptor Carl Akeley (1864 - 1926) to Africa.  (If you think you don’t know Akeley, think again: he is the man responsible for most of the great mounted exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History.)

Leigh was born in West Virginia and began his formal training at age 14 in the Maryland Institute in Baltimore.  At 17 he traveled to Germany, studying at the Royal Academy in Munich.  Leigh proved to be an industrious student; he worked with Karl Raupp in cast drawing and Nicolas Gysis in life drawing.  These men were superb teachers and Leigh learned much from them.  (As you may remember from earlier columns, Russell disdained formal art training.  One may well wonder what masterpieces he would’ve produced with a more solid sense of draftsmanship!)

Leigh also learned much from Ludwig von Loefftz.  His instruction emphasized an alla-prima painting method; this sense of spontaneity, along with Leigh’s already trained drawing methods, were a felicitous combination.  Leigh was now able to create vigorous, action-filled scenes with the precision and skill of a European master.

Leigh returned to the US in 1896, when he was 30, after 13 years studying abroad.  He lived in New York for 10 years, working primarily as an illustrator.  When Leigh hit 40 he ventured West to paint what was already a vanishing world.  As Stephen Gjerston writes in Frontiers of Enchantment: The Outdoor Studies of William R. Leigh: Leigh was able to break away and pursue his boyhood dream of painting the American West.  For Leigh, the West embodied everything that was intrinsically American.  Like Thomas Moran, he disapproved of American artists imitating foreign styles and was determined to paint pictures of the landscape and life that he considered to be uniquely American.  With his ability as a draftsman, his sense of drama and his eye for color Leigh was ideally suited to record the colorful and picturesque way of life in the Southwest; a way of life that was quickly vanishing.

Today we are looking at a picture called Master of His Domain, painted around 1920.  This is a good-sized oil, 40 x 30, currently in the Rockwell-Corning Museum, New York.  As already established, the draftsmanship is superb.  Look at how Leigh delineates the lanky muscles of the figure with clear, unfussy lines.  The face is powerful and introspective and never descends into caricature.  The left arm rests lazily on the bent leg; the right hand holds the right calf.  No excess of movement or line, just simple and natural, like the subject itself.  The quiver of arrows at his side is cleanly rendered, and particular attention is paid to his moccasins, armband and ornamental feathers.  This quiet virtuosity would not be out of place in the most finished production of the most skilled of European masters; indeed, the figure itself is a triumph of realism.

Where Leigh hits his masterstroke, though, is that he grounds this supremely realistic figure in a setting of almost Impressionist color.  The rocks, trees, cliff and sky are rendered in thick brushstrokes of color with little delineation or detail. 

In the barren but beautiful landscape, the figure is indeed master of his domain.  However, one cannot help but believe that Leigh was indulging in a bit of bitter irony with his title – this beautiful picture is also an elegy for an entire people and way of life.  The American Indian is indeed sitting on a pinnacle, but he will not be there for long.

More William Leigh tomorrow!

Saving Their Lieutenant by Charles Schreyvogel

I have been enjoying our time in the American Western frontier so much that I think we’ll stay there throughout the week.

Wits as diverse as Gene Autry (1907-1998) and Cole Porter (1891-1964) have made sport of the drug store cowboy, and a quick look at your correspondent would guarantee a snort of derision if any affectation were made of being a ‘real Western character.’  (The Upper West Side of Manhattan, perhaps, but no further!)

However, a deep and abiding love for the myth of the American West can be a potent and nourishing thing.  I have been entranced by the West ever since first researching a novel that would include cowboy star Tom Mix (1880-1939) and that has led to a lifelong love affair with Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917), Western movies, classic Western television and radio shows, and, of course, Western art.

It seems that many of the artists that have made the most substantive contributions in defining the way we think of the mythic American West have been tenderfeet, or worse, what would now be called Eastern Liberal Elites.  Figures as diverse as Owen Wister, Ned Buntline, Zane Grey and Frederick Remington were all Easterners.  To that list we must add painter Charles Schreyvogel (1861-1912). 

Schreyvogel spent most of his life an underappreciated (and underpaid) painter.  He grew up in New York’s Lower East Side, the poor son of German immigrant shopkeepers.  Unable to afford formal art training, Schreyvogel taught himself how to draw.  He won the Thomas Clarke Prize in 1901 at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design.

Schreyvogel was enraptured by the myth of the West, then gaining terrific potency through dime novels and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West.  A visit to Cody’s Wild West was a life-changing event for the young artist.  Schreyvogel would later make several trips West to paint Indians, but Cody and his theatrical milieu were his real creative wellspring.  He was a frequent guest at the Cody home, and his work is more a homage to the idea of the Wild West than a realistic depiction of the sort found in Russell and Remington (who hated Schreyvogel as a poseur).  In fact, one of his paintings, The Summit Springs Rescue, shows Cody in action against the Cheyenne. 

Schreyvogel’s paintings of the West now reside in the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma, and the Gilcrease Museum, also in Oklahoma.  Since the American West is filled with many ironies, it is irresistible to point out that many of these classic Western paintings were created in Schreyvogel’s studio in Hoboken, New Jersey.  (Annie Oakley was also a longtime New Jersey resident, living in Nutley.)

Saving Their Lieutenant is typical of Schreyvogel’s work.  It is a scene of dynamic action, seemingly coming right towards the viewer (a recurring motif in his work and clearly influenced by the Wild West shows of the era).  Horses and cavalrymen are clearly and cleanly depicted, while the barren Western landscape is rendered in a few economical strokes of color and detail.  The high country of the background is so subtle as to almost meld with the horizon point, creating the illusion of limitless depth and space to his vision of the West.

It takes perhaps a second glace at the painting to realize that the figure in the foreground is actually cradling his commanding officer in the crook of his arm.  The ‘hero’ of the painting manages to keep his lieutenant mounted while fighting off the suggested hoards of rampaging Native Americans in the background.  This is, perhaps, illustrative of Schreyvogel’s strongest quality, and the biggest difference between him and Russell and Remington.  Where Russell paints a lyrical and idyllic West, and Remington a West of hardship and travail, Schreyvogel’s West is a land of heroism.  He is the first great American painter influenced by the myth of the West rather than its actuality, and, as such, has become something of a mythic figure himself.