"For most of us, the art of the American West is epitomized in the work of two gifted turn-of-the-century artists: Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Indeed, the way they jointly imagined the semi-legendary Old west to have been has now become the way we imagine it: the images of the Old West that we see today in films, in book and magazine illustrations, in retrospective paintings and sculpture, even in the theater of our own minds, are all in some degree beholden to images crystallized nearly 100 years ago by these two men. The term "crystallized" is, however, important, for Remington and Russel obviously invented neither the West nor the art that depicted it. Artists -- some of great distinction -- had been producing images of the West for a full century before Remington and Russell appeared on the scene, and Remington and Russell, for all their skill and innovative brilliance, worked within an already established tradition. They may have produced some of the most memorable expressions of that tradition, but they never broke with it. Nor have most of today's Western artists really broken with it. Even works as original and personal as the masterly paintings of Georgia O"Keeffe are strewn with such familiar elements of Western imagery as sun-bleached antelope skulls, barren, eroded hills, and stark adobe walls. If the intentions of Western artists have been as various as idioms in which they have addressed us, for 200 years the great traditions of Western art have nevertheless given their works both a common grammar and a special resonance. In this handsome portfolio of western painting and sculpture since the 1820s, author Kate F. Jennings well illustrates the continuities that underlie the seeming diversity of Western art. And by focusing in particular on Remington and Russell, she allows us to see their work in its true context -- as an especially brilliant link in what amounts to an unbroken chain, as a novel and imaginative summation of all that had gone before and a startlingly potent influence on all that would follow."--Publisher's description