Reviewed by: Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays by Ron Tyler Tracee W. Robertson Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays. By Ron Tyler. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. ix + 286 pp. Photographs, bibliography, index. $65.00, cloth. Ron Tyler's Collected Essays tell a powerful story of men probing the American West in the search for knowledge and facing colliding conceptions of beauty. The experience changed them, as though their passions, once aligned with nineteenth-century European and American ideals, became obsolete in their instinctive truth to the people and the land they witnessed. This is a book of authoritative storytelling, in which images command a leading role and the ultimate subject is "the brave life" (267). This new collection by one of Texas's most respected scholars, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, draws the Great Plains into the broad American context, as a driving force in defining a national history and identity, documented in paintings, drawings, and prints (75, 261). The country had achieved political independence, and now it needed a unique voice in literature and the fine arts (56). Tyler's book opens by framing world exploration and the role of the expedition artist. It closes with a sensitive look at the end of an era, both in the land and people and in the changing appetite for artistic expression. Particularly moving for our time, several chapters refer to the "Enlightenment pseudoscience of physiognomy" that sought to answer "the most challenging scientific question of the day: the origin, or origins, of the races" (18, 57). These stories remind us that such movements leave a mark of inherited perceptions or beliefs, often contrary to shared human dignity. Apt for these documentary artworks is the question, How do we know what we know? The images presented in this handsome book span nearly the entire century, just decades after American Independence, through the Civil War and the turn of the century. The reader's voyage begins with a Russian circumnavigation that documented the West Coast, followed by an important chapter chronicling a European expedition on the Missouri River. Tyler then includes fascinating stories about American artists, both well-known and obscure, whose careers entwined them irrevocably with the West. Ron Tyler's essays at once illuminate and deepen each other and unveil sweeping themes, such as the history of lithography, the natures of artistic patronage and objectivity, and the inexorable march of thought. Each, while skillfully written, involves a necessary sea of proper names that, without prior knowledge, may convey only a sense of the import of a given detail. Nonetheless, Tyler's accessible and elegant [End Page 152] writing style soon utterly absorbs one in his vast and human subject. Tracee W. Robertson Wichita Falls Museum of Art at Midwestern State University Wichita Falls, Texas Copyright © 2022 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln