Review of \u3ci\u3eForging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney: With a Catalogue of His Works.\u3c/i\u3e By Linda Bantel and Peter H. Hassrick

Since the appearance of Francis S. Grubar\u27s William Ranney, Painter of the Early West, a catalogue raisonne published to accompany the artist\u27s 1962 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Ranney\u27s reputation has revolved around the thirty-odd images of western trappers, hunters, and pioneers he worked up in New York {and later in an impressive two-story studio he kept across the river in West Hoboken} during the 1840s and early 1850s, at least in part from sketches dating to the time of his enlistment as a soldier in the Texan war for independence more than a decade earlier. The present account, Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney, while paying more balanced attention to the artist\u27s broader oeuvre, nonetheless privileges these same western images-works described by Sarah E. Boehme as pictorial narratives of roughly contemporary life on the prairies that contributed to the region\u27s significance in the national mythology. The publication documents, celebrates, and targets visitors to the 2006 Ranney retrospective organized at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center\u27s Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming, which has since traveled to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it closed in August 2007. Not having seen the exhibition, I will limit my comments to the book itself, the scholarly ambitions of which are both evident and admirable though uneven