Paul Mellon (1907–1999) was an unparalleled collector of British art. His collection, now at Yale in the museum and study center he founded to house it, rivals those in Britain’s national museums and is unquestionably the most comprehensive representation of British art held outside of the United Kingdom. This book celebrates the centenary of his birth. Five introductory essays examine Mellon’s extraordinary collecting activity, as well as his role in creating both the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London as gifts to his alma mater (Yale 1929). The catalogue section showcases 148 of the most exquisite and important paintings, watercolors, drawings, prints, sculpture, rare books, and manuscript material in the Yale Center’s collection, including major works by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner.

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A common theme of western American art—from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O’Keeffe—is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies.

Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured them caught in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time: when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences—through large-edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions—significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region’s landscape in the twentieth century.