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Carmen Thyssen Collection
William Tylee Ranney

The Scouting Party

1851
Oil on canvas.
55.8 x 91.4 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1981.78
)
Room B
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
More than a decade after his visit to Ranney's suburban New Jersey studio Henry T. Tuckerman recalled the guns, saddles and cutlasses crowding its walls "which might lead a visitor to image he had entered a pioneer's cabin or border chieftain's hut." They were props for the Western genre pictures that established the artist's reputation in the late 1840s and were inspired by his adventures as a volunteer in the Texas War of Independence in 1836. "He had caught the spirit of border adventure", wrote Tuckerman, "and was enamoured of the picturesque in scenery and character outside the range of civilisation; and to represent and give them historical interest was his artistic ambition."

The Scouting Party is one of series of images of trappers and mountain men painted by Ranney between 1849 and 1853 in which he evocatively depicted the remote Western frontier. The barren prairie setting and the brilliant last rays of sunset throw his scouts into relief as they watch the fires of the Indians camping below. The sublime scale and isolation of the plains -long mistaken for desert- fascinated Americans during the 1830s and 1840s. A popular tale of a journey to Texas recorded that "the idea of straying upon a Prairie [...] had ere this presented itself to my imagination, was a gloomy and indeed a very dangerous and horrid thing." Washington Irving hurried to the Great Plains upon returning from Europe in 1832 and described their "inexpressive loneliness" in A Tour on the Prairies: "The loneliness of a forest is nothing to it. There the view is shut it by trees, and the imagination is left free to picture some livelier scene beyond. But here we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence."

Yet these descriptions, like the Western expeditions, took possession of the landscape. Irving was praised "for turning these poor barbarous steppes into classical land." Ranney imposed classic order on the scene, abstracting and carefully modelling the figures of the scouts and horses.

Tuckerman wrote that Ranney's works "won the common eye and heart, and have a genuine American scope and tone." Unlike the exotic figures depicted by Alfred Jacob Miller and Charles Deas (although Deas's Jacques (The Mountain Man) of 1844 may have influenced Ranney's work), Ranney's scouts were ordinary men. They appealed to the democratic tastes of the members of the American Art-Union which during the 1840s championed native subject matter and genre scenes through a system of lotteries and auctions. Between 1845 and 1853 the Art-Union distributed 26 of Ranney's paintings. The Scouting Party was reproduced as a woodcut engraving in the Bulletin of the American Art-Union in September 1851 and sold to a member the following year.

Elizabeth Garrity Ellis

19th Centurys. XIX - Pintura norteamericana. CostumbrismoPaintingOilcanvas
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The Scouting Party. El destacamento de exploradores, 1851
The Scouting Party
William Tylee Ranney

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundación Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes, and non-commercial uses.

Use for educational and research purposes is understood as the non-commercial or advertising use of images in presentations, conferences, school or university work, in classes at regulated education institutions, as well as in academic publications, with a circulation of less than 1,000 copies, provided that it is non-profit.

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Any use other than those indicated above will require the prior written authorization of the Fundación.

Any request for educational and research use or for non-commercial use (including academic publications), should be directed by email to the Museum Photo Library through the email address archivo.fotografico@museothyssen.org. This department manages the worldwide distribution of the images of the works of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum and the management of their reproduction rights for those uses.

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  • If the image is used for reproduction, the work must be reproduced in its entirety. The image may not be manipulated, deformed, modified or altered in any way. In particular, no superposition (of images or texts) on the reproduction is allowed.
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The Scouting Party. El destacamento de exploradores, 1851
The Scouting Party
William Tylee Ranney

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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The Photo Library of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza offers sale and rental service of photographic material of all the works of the Carmen Thyssen Collection.

To request images or permits for commercial use in academic or research publications, that is, catalogues of other institutions, monographs and other specialised publications, you should contact the Photo Library by email at the e-mail: @email.

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Requests for scans or new photographs will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Once approved, an additional fee will apply. Re-photographing a work will require a minimum of six weeks to complete.

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