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"View Slideshow\n\nFrom the time of the louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the demise of the western movie in the 1960s, the West was a dominant presence in the American imagination. The West represented opportunity, adventure and beauty, and it fed the nation's sense of itself as the country with the most auspicious future in the world. There have been memorable writers\u2014Willa Cather and Bret Harte, for example\u2014and important artists, such as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, whose work contributed to the myth of the West. But one group who celebrated the myth in a unique way were the rich businessmen from the eastern half of the country who enjoyed, either as owners or visitors, the phenomenon created for their pleasure known as the dude ranch.\n\nThere is a happy marriage of mythmakers and connoisseur, therefore, in the collection of western art put together by a Yale graduate and industrialist named Bradford Brinton and housed at his former ranch near Big Horn, Wyoming. Brinton, who had an interest in western art at least from the time of his first visit to Wyoming in 1910 \"for the hunting season,\" bought his 600 gentlemanly acres for a vacation home in 1923 in an area that Kenneth Schuster, director and chief curator of the Bradford Brinton Memorial and Museum, calls \"dude ranch heaven.\"\n\nThere is a happy marriage of mythmakers and connoisseur in Brinton's collection of western art.\n\nThe purchase of the Quarter Circle A Ranch, as the property is known, seems to have turned Brinton's liking into a passion. He developed relationships with galleries that specialized in western art in New York, where he maintained an apartment; and he began to collect works by Remington and Russell\u2014and even ornithological prints from the famous series done almost a hundred years earlier by John James Audubon.\n\nRemington, perhaps the best known of western artists, is valued for his small, kinetic sculptures of cowboys\u2014singly or in groups\u2014that seem to fuse horseflesh and human flesh in arrested motion. He had decided as a young man in the 1880s to record the vanishing West, and in addition to sculpting, he painted scenes of western cavalry battles and ranching in watercolors and oils. There were also very popular print portfolios of his paintings; and he even illustrated Theodore Roosevelt's youthful memoir, Ranch Life and the Hunting- Trail. Brinton owned two Remington bronzes and a total of 15 pen-and-ink drawings and oil paintings, including two that were done for the Roosevelt book.\n\nCharles M. Russell was a self-taught artist, who had actually worked as a cowboy in the 1880s and spent time with a Blackfeet tribe. In the first decade of the 20th century he slowly gained recognition for his paintings, magazine illustrations and sculpture of the western scenes of his youth. He settled in Great Falls, Montana, a few hundred miles from Brinton's ranch, where he stayed until his death in 1926. In the Brinton museum there are seven Russell sculptures and a number of watercolors and drawings.\n\nAs well as collecting the big names like Remington and Audubon, Brinton was fascinated by the western artists he knew\u2014among whom he would probably have counted Russell, although it is not certain that they ever met. One resident of national stature he did befriend was Will James, a multitalented man who lived for a time in Montana and who was the author of novels about cowboys and western life, which he also illustrated. Edward Borein, a California artist, came to Wyoming to paint, became acquainted with Brinton and eventually was a guest at the ranch. Among local talent whose work Brinton collected were Hans Kleiber, an Austrian-born printmaker, and Elling William Gollings, a cowboy artist.\n\nAs well as collecting the big names like Remington and Audubon, Bradford Brinton was fascinated by the western artists he knew.\n\nAfter Brinton's death, his sister, Helen, who had her own spread near Phoenix, kept the Quarter Circle A Ranch and its collections much as her brother had left them; and at her death in 1960 a trust was established to create the museum and to maintain the entire property as a bird and game sanctuary. On spring days during the migration season more than 50 species can be identified flying over Brinton land, on which many different kinds of indigenous trees and shrubs thrive, including alder, cottonwood, aspen, chokecherry, buffalo bush and wild plum.\n\nThe museum is composed of the large white principal house, which was built in 1892 and added on to by Brinton in 1927-28; the saddle barn; the carriage barn; various ranch buildings (including a barn built by Brinton for his polo ponies); a log guesthouse called the Little Goose Creek Lodge, which is furnished with custom-made rustic pine and birch furniture; and the Reception Gallery, which was built in 1965. The entire museum is open from Memorial Day to Labor Day; the main house is open in September as well; and the gallery is open throughout much of the year, during which it holds special exhibitions. It also holds Brinton's permanent collection of Native American art and artifacts, which includes articles of clothing and blankets from many tribes, and 35 portraits of Blackfeet Indians done during the winter of 1919\u201320 by painter Winold Reiss.\n\nThe rooms of the main house, with their antique American furniture and dazzling western art, have many Navajo rugs on the floors, which Brinton probably bought on trips to his sister's ranch in Arizona. In addition to his other interests, he was a collector of rare books and manuscripts, and his library contains an Abraham Lincoln letter, a George Washington document and a William Penn autograph.\n\nThe grace of the museum, with its high art, atmosphere of comfort and integration into the beautiful scenery\u2014there is a dramatic view of the front range of the Bighorn Mountains from the property\u2014recalls a day when \"dude ranch\" was not a phrase akin to \"theme park\" but suggested the engagement of all the senses in a leisurely appreciation of the West.\n\nThe Bradford Brinton Memorial and Museum\n\n 239 Brinton Road\n\n Big Horn, Wyoming 82833\n\n Telephone: 307-672-3173\n\n Fax: 307-672-3258"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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