Women are not usually seen as the heroes and protagonists of the American West and its landscape, especially in myth and art.

The late nineteenth century quote and directive often attributed to Horace Greeley, “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country,” epitomizes this stereotype. The country actively encouraged men to be the leading figures of the Western story. Renowned male artists of the West, such as Frederic Remington (1861-1909) and Charles Russell (1852-1916), furthered this view through their dramatic depictions of fearless cowboys in paint and bronze. Later, it was John Wayne’s masculine cowboy silhouette that symbolized the West.

Utah and Colorado women artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, though, challenge these myths. Their paintings and photographs complicate the stories we tell about the Rocky Mountains, the Western landscape, and women’s place therein.¹ Their works and careers reveal that the American West was never the simple, masculine rugged frontier that lives large in the American conception, but something layered, nuanced, and multi-gendered.

Helen Henderson Chain, Royal Gorge on the Arkansas River, 1890, Oil Painting on canvas, 43 × 22 in. (109 × 58.9 cm), Courtesy History Colorado, Courtesy History Colorado-Denver, Colorado

Thomas Moran, Mountain of the Holy Cross, 1890, watercolor and gouache over graphite on blue laid paper, 17 13/16 × 12 3/8 in. (45 × 31 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

J. A. Chain, The Chain gang abroad: around Europe with a Camera, 1888, Photograph album containing 274 mounted albumen prints, many with hand-coloring, 16 3/20 × 20 17/20 in. (41 × 53 cm), Princeton University Library

J. A. Chain, The Chain gang abroad: around Europe with a Camera, 1888, Photograph album containing 274 mounted albumen prints, many with hand-coloring, 16 3/20 × 20 17/20 in. (41 × 53 cm), Princeton University Library

Laura Gilpin, Ghost Rock, 1919, Platinum print, 9 5/8 × 7 9/16 in. (24.5 × 19.2 cm), © 1979 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Alfred Stieglitz, The Dying Chestnut, 1919, Gelatin Silver Print, 9 ½ × 7 ½ in. (24 × 19 cm), The Art Institute of Chicago

Helen Henderson Chain’s (1849-1892) dramatic and romantic landscape paintings specifically demonstrate this complexity. Her works such as Burros on the Trail (1870–1890) and Old Miners Cabin (1885) follow the stylistic traditions of the Hudson River School painters who came west, like Thomas Moran (1837-1926) and Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902). These artists and their contemporaries created the template for how the West was to be painted—dramatic, romantic, godly. H. Henderson Chain followed their example, painting dramatic vistas that emphasize diagonal lines, large expansive spaces, and the smallness of the humans who inhabit them.²
While doing this, she climbed and explored the mountains of Colorado alongside her husband, subverting the idea that it was only men who could paint the drama of the West.³ In photographs she took in Europe, H. Henderson Chain and other women are seen traversing the landscapes in long dark dresses, hiking poles in hand. Her self-documentation as a mountain climber and artist further destabilize an imagined West where only men are free to explore.

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), active in Colorado and New Mexico a few decades after H. Henderson Chain, is another figure that exemplifies these nuances. Photography, like landscape painting, was male-dominated in the early twentieth century—and especially those who took cameras to desolate and rugged landscapes, were assumed to be men. But L. Gilpin, who was gifted a Kodiak Brownie camera on her twelfth birthday, became one of the most important photographers of the American West. Her photographs capture the drama of the landscape, yet with a pictorial softness and painterly quality.
The Ghost Rock. Garden of the Gods (1919) illustrates L. Gilpin’s use of pictorialism, a style that aimed to make photographs look more like paintings. In this composition, L. Gilpin captures the sharp rugged and dangerous cliffs in a black and white haze, their sharpness dulled by the way L. Gilpin photographed them. Her photos of the Grand Canyon also show a softer, more composed perspective of the vast landscape. She homes in on the details, brings the composition in together, and emphasizes the textures, lines, and shapes in her scenes, in ways that contrast to the modern, crisp style of later photographers of the West, including Ansel Adams (1902-1984).
Like H. Henderson Chain’s paintings, L. Gilpin’s photographs can be read simultaneously as masculine and feminine. That L. Gilpin was taking her camera and shooting the western landscape, traversing these dangerous areas, was seen as a masculine act in and of itself—then complicated by the pictorial way in which she captured it.
Her photo Work in the Garden of the Gods (1920) further shows the nuance of gender in the American West—men and women sit under the shadow of a towering cliff, painting en plein air. Her composition directly contradicts the myth of the lonesome cowboy in these spaces. As a lesbian woman in a long-term queer relationship, L. Gilpin’s own biography further challenges assumptions about gender and art in the American West.⁴

As Colorado and Utah moved into the Progressive and New Deal Eras of the 1920s and 1930s, their cultures and the artworks the women living there created took a turn toward the modern. These periods both brought a focus on bettering society and creating more support for women, children, and families throughout the United States.⁵ This oftentimes included more support for the arts and artists through programs like the WPA and the founding of art institutions, organizations, and societies.⁶
There was a sense of hope coming also from women’s suffrage, in the United States passed at the national level in 1920.
Artists started to paint the landscape with fresh eyes and approaches—influenced by the trends of modernism that came out of Europe at the turn of the century and then spread to artists around the world, including in the U.S. The compositions are tighter, emphasizing shape, imagined color, line, and texture more than the vastness and largeness of the landscape. Artists such as Utah’s Mabel Frazer (1887-1981), Louise Richards Farnsworth (1878-1969), and Florence Ware (1891-1972), and Colorado’s Elisabeth Spalding (1868-1954) and Annie Van Briggle Ritter (1868-1929), embraced new ways of thinking about and depicting the West, using vibrant, dynamic landscapes to reflect cultural optimism, mobility, and reform.

Elisabeth Spalding, Cedar from Rock Subject (Colorado), 1929, 30 × 20 in. [76.2 × 50.8 cm], watercolor on paperboard, Denver Art Museum/Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art

Louise Richards Farnsworth, Hay Stacks, 1935, oil on board, 18 × 24 in. [45.7 × 61 cm], Springville Museum of Art

Anne Van Briggle Ritter, Rising Thunderheads, 1926, oil on board, 18 × 21 ½ in. [45,7 × 54,6 cm], Denver Art Museum/Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art

Elisabeth Spalding, Castelorosso. Rock of Asia Minor Shore, 1934, watercolor, 9.5 × 12.5 in. [24,1 × 31,8 cm], Denver Public Library

E. Spalding’s Cedar from Rock Subject (Colorado) (1929) embodies these changes. Instead of emphasizing the vast grandeur of the Colorado Rockies, Spalding places a lone tree at the center of her composition, the multicolored layers of rock radiating out beneath it. In L. Richard Farnsworth’s Haystacks (1935), the mounds of bright yellow cut hay are as physically and visually dominant as the purple Wasatch Mountains in the background.

Their paintings emphasize movement, the play of light and shadow, and an overall brightness and modern sensibility to the land in the west. They stand in sharp contrast to the daunting and impenetrable wilderness of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School depictions. These bold colors and undulating lines paint the Utah and Colorado mountains and desert as something modern, fresh, and hopeful.

In Utah, Alice Merrill Horne (1868-1948) was a leading figure in the progressive movement—advocating for better arts funding and support, children’s health, and other humanitarian causes. It was her advocacy and work as a state legislator that created the first state arts agency in the United States, the Utah Art Institute, in 1899. Her influence and philosophy in Utah tied beauty and art to both moral and spiritual growth, and she worked tirelessly to support and advocate for Utah artists.⁷ For Horne, and other devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (most commonly known as the Mormon Church), this was not only a moral and civic duty, but a uniquely devotional one. Horne was the leader of a group of women, and other artists in Utah, who saw the creation of and advocacy for art and beauty as a way to spread and practice their religious beliefs.⁸

In Mormon Utah, where women were expected to prioritize family roles, art also offered a socially acceptable path to prominence, even for non-Mormon women like Florence Ware (1891-1972). Art was a kind of loophole to these cultural limitations. Because it could deal with beautifying the home, or capturing the beauty of God’s nature, it was seen as a “safe” realm for women to gain some prominence, power, and prestige as public advocates and community leaders for the arts. Through their artistic output and administrative duties in academia or in arts institutions and organizations, these women sought, and in many ways obtained, more freedom and independence. Their civic leadership and institutional influence challenged the myth of women as passive figures on the frontier; they were not merely subjects of the story of the American West, but active shapers of its cultural and social landscape.⁹

The women also traveled significantly, throughout the western United States and beyond, contradicting the idea that their world was static and in one place. Many of the women artists studied in Paris, or in the eastern United States, at the Art Institute of Chicago or Students League of New York for example, and traveled extensively throughout Europe. They often took what they learned in these formal settings back home and translated it for local audiences. Louise Richards Farnsworth (1878-1969) grew up in Utah but moved to New York as a young woman. Her work was lauded back East for capturing the landscape of the West and its spirit.¹⁰ Mabel Frazer (1887-1981) studied in Chicago and later in Italy, and traveled extensively throughout the southwest. She was often quoted talking about the importance of the Western land to her work.¹¹ This mobility contradicted the image of the isolated, provincial Western woman, revealing instead a generation of artists who were cosmopolitan and modern while still deeply engaged with the Western landscape.

Together these artists show us that the West and its landscape cannot be neatly divided into masculine and feminine; or wild and civilized; it is always both. The dominant narrative likes to imagine the West as monolithic, but these women and their work show it was never that simple. Their artwork and depictions of the West dismantle its story as a singular male domain. Notably, as white women, their work and this deconstruction has limits. The complexities of settler colonialism, borderlands, and racism are largely absent from their work, as are, for the most part, Native American peoples and their communities (the exception in this particular group of artists may be L. Gilpin, who spent significant time photographing Navajo people).¹² Their art does not usually challenge the racial myths that dominate how the West has been understood and portrayed. Despite this, their art reveals some of its complexity rather than its myth.