Sid Richardson began collecting the works of Frederic Remington and Charles Russell in 1942 with the help of Newhouse Galleries of New York City. Newhouse became Richardson’s principal dealer and helped him acquire the majority of his paintings. Oilmen like Richardson, Amon Carter, Thomas Gilcrease, Frank Phillips and R.W. Norton, themselves part of the western legend of freewheeling enterprise, established through their collections a link to the romantic legends of the Old West.

Sid Richardson did not limit his collection to Remington and Russell. While he showed no interest in Western landscapists or the pre-Civil War documentarians, he did acquire works by such relatively unknown late nineteenth-century artists as Gilbert Gaul, Peter Moran, and Charles F. Browne. He had a preference for paintings with action or suspense and collected such works by Charles Schreyvogel, Oscar E. Berninghaus, Frank Tenney Johnson, William R. Leigh, and Edwin W. Deming. But his primary interest was in Remington and Russell, adding an occasional work to his collection until a few years before his death on September 30, 1959. Time has confirmed his wisdom. Remington and Russell remain today what they were in their own day: the “titans of Western art.”

Collection Additions

The Sid Richardson Foundation has acquired four additional paintings since Mr. Richardson’s death. Although the Museum does not have an active acquisitions program, the board of directors have on occasion added new works to the collection. With the addition of Frederic Remington’s The Apaches! (1904), The Dry Camp (1907), Among the Led Horses (1909), and The Love Call (1909), the collection was significantly strengthened. The Sid Richardson Museum now owns 4 of the 17 oil paintings from Remington’s last, critically acclaimed exhibition, held at Knoedler Gallery in New York City in December 1909 just prior to his death, making its collection “one of the finest assemblages of major late-life Remington paintings in the world,” according to Dr. Brian W. Dippie, noted authority and scholar of both Remington and Russell.

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