Arthur F.Tait, Check-Keep Your Distance, 1853. Lithograph, 16 x 21 1/2 inches. Photograph by: Tad Fruits

New York artist Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait was already a popular painter of wildlife and hunting scenes when he began to portray life in the American West in the mid-1800s. Although his realistic scenes appeared to be authentic, they were not based on Tait’s own observations, for he never traveled west of Chicago and thus never saw the events he so graphically rendered.

Born in England, Tait became interested in the American frontier in the 1840s while assisting the artist George Catlin, who was touring his famous Indian Gallery of Native American portraits and western landscapes through Europe. It was Tait’s fascination with its vast expanses of wilderness regions that led him to immigrate to the United States in 1850. He established his studio in New York City, but spent much time in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, finally living there full-time as he grew older. At home in the woods, he was an excellent hunter, amateur naturalist, and devoted realist painter of animals, woodlands, and hunting scenes.

In 1852, the Currier & Ives art publishing company began to reproduce his sporting and nature scenes as color lithographs, distributing them widely. Tait’s pictures reached the largest audience of any mid-nineteenth-century painter, and he was perennially popular. He soon began creating his decade-long series of western frontier paintings for Currier & Ives.

For many years, Tait was one of Currier & Ives’s most prominent and best-selling artists, earning a steady and substantial income. Toward the end of his career, when he could no longer explore his beloved woods, he began painting domestic animals in charming rural settings closer to home. They, too, were popular.

Tait’s fanciful images portraying exotic and dramatic scenes—usually featuring conflicts between trappers and Indians or between the harsh land and would-be settlers—played a pivotal role in shaping attitudes toward the West among a public avid to collect his latest print. The lithograph Check—Keep Your Distance, in the Gund collection, was an early work in the series.

Tait died in 1905 in New York City, leaving behind a long and successful career as a painter whose work included the West of his imagination, inspiring generations of Americans to travel there.