The Denver Art Museum, which has been steadily establishing itself as a center for Western American art for more than a decade, announced that it would receive the bulk of one of the most important private collections of 19th- and 20th-century Western art in private hands.
The collection, 50 paintings and sculptures amassed by Henry Roath, a retired Denver lawyer and banker, includes significant works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington and Ernest L. Blumenschein and is particularly strong in works by the Taos Society of Artists, founded by Blumenschein and others in New Mexico in 1915.
“It’s one of the most important gifts in the history of the museum,†said Thomas Brent Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art, founded at the museum in 2001 for the study and exhibition of Western art. The donation will give the museum its first major painting by Moran and will complement a Bierstadt already in the collection. The gift also adds two important casts of Remington’s “Bronco Buster†to go along with a work already in the collection, “The Cheyenne,†considered one of his masterpieces.
More than 60 pieces from the Roath collection have been on long-term loan to the museum since late 2011. Mr. Roath, who will also give the museum $500,000 to establish a fund for acquisitions, began collecting four decades ago and became serious in the 1990s, focusing his attention on Western art. “As my finances got better, my collection got better,†he said in a recent interview. But after many years with the paintings and bronzes, he said, “it seemed that artwork of that quality should be seen by people other than just its owners.â€
