Museo Carmen Thyssen

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the conquest of the Wild West became more than a historical event in the founding of the United States of America, developing into a universal myth in which legend progressively replaced history.

In the arts, fascination for those majestic unexplored landscapes (in the work of artists such as George Catlin and Albert Bierstadt), curiosity about the ways of life and customs of the Indian tribes (as expressed in Karl Bodmer’s engravings) and the glorification of trappers and cowboys (as in Frederick Remington’s sculptures) were conveyed in a broad range of works in several genres. These artists’ romantic view of the lands and inhabitants of the western Mississippi helped create the “illusion” of a wild, idyllic and dangerous place, which found its way into popular culture through the myths of cowboys and Indians that sprang up in the nineteenth century and were consolidated in the twentieth century by motion pictures.

The Spanish equivalent to this fabulous frontier territory of the American West was a haunt of bandits: thieves and highwaymen who operated from the Andalusian highlands of Ronda and the Sierra Morena. Romanticism steeped these characters and their lawless way of life and natural surroundings in legend, and their fame was spread across Europe by nineteenth-century artists, making banditry a cliché of Spain’s past that is also world-famous today.

Imagen: Según Karl Bodmer, Mató-Tope. Ataviado con sus atributos bélicos, 1839-1843. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza