Cody, Wyoming

Eighty miles from Fishing Bridge, and out the west entrance to Yellowstone, is Cody, Wyoming. We drove there today to resupply at the nearest supermarket and to visit the Buffalo Bill Center of the West - a five museum center dedicated to the art, artifacts, crafts, cultures, traditions and history of the American West. We were particularly interested in seeing two of the museums, the Whitney Western Art Museum and the Draper Natural History Museum. We decided to pass on the Cody Firearms and Buffalo Bill Museums. It would have been nice to have had time to visit the Plains Indian Museum.

The drive out the west entrance to Cody was through some pretty spectacular landscape.

We spent most of our time in the Whitney. It houses a comprehensive collection of paintings, sculpture and prints depicting the West. Artists represented include Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell and Joseph Henry Sharp. 

A detailed presentation of how bronzes are cast used this sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt by Alexander Phimister Proctor.

There were several magnificent sculptures of large animals.

One whole gallery featured "Yelllowstone through Artists' Eyes". This is Lower Falls from Artist's Point, where we were on Wednesday.

Bierstadt's Lower Falls

Bierstadt's painting of the Golden Gate at Mommouth.

More contemporary depictions of Old Faithful and the Firehole River.

Morning Glory Poll

Old Faithful

And two more of...

Lower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.

There were paintings depicting animals and...

a painting, "Tonto Sleeping" that uses Roussou's, A Gypsy Sleeping" for inspiration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeping_Gypsy

There were interesting contemporary pictures of the West.

And, a lot of bronzes by Frederick Remington.

The Mountain Man

Remington's reconstructed studio. 

Medicine Man

End of the Trail

After spending a couple of hours in the Whitney we came outside for lunch.

Two horseback riders came by, left, then returned to sweep up the evidence that they had been there. They took the bucket and emptied it in the adjacent garden.

The gardens also contained a sculpture of our old friend the prickly pear cactus.

Another garden sculpture.

After lunch we went through the Draper Natural History Museum where taxidermy was used very effectively to present animals as art.