William Ranney, versatile storyteller.

The nineteenth-century American artist William Ranney has long been held in high esteem for his evocative paintings of the nation's westward expansion. Sometimes these are poignant depictions of settlers on the move, suffering hardships and even death along the way, and sometimes they are paintings of stalwart frontiersmen at home in the wilderness. The versatile Ranney also treated many other subjects such as trapping, hunting for birds and deer, and fishing near Newark Bay and on the Hoboken marshes of New Jersey. He also depicted sleigh riding, dogs, horses, cows, and street urchins, as well as historical events of the colonial period.

A traveling exhibition of Ranney's work, organized by the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, from September 29 to January 1, 2007. Future venues will be listed in Calendar. Entitled Forging an American Identity: The Art of William Ranney, the show includes some sixty paintings that span the full range of Ranney's prolific and successful career, which was cut short by his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the catalogue raisonne of Ranney's works in all mediums written by Linda Bantel and Peter Hassrick.

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In the nearly twenty years that Ranney lived in New York, Texas, North Carolina, and New Jersey he completed at least 150 canvases, a large percentage of which are now known only through the records of various nineteenth-century exhibitions. Confounding scholars for decades is the absence of a paper trail, for Ranney left no letters, diaries, account books, or inventories. Despite this, a considerable amount of information about his life has been reconstructed by a succession of tenacious art historians.

Ranney was born in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1813, and in 1827 the family moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, a crossroads for shipping goods to points west and south. There they settled with the artist's uncle William Nott Jr., a prosperous dry goods merchant. It is presumed that Ranney had some artistic instruction there. Sometime in the early 1830s, following the completion of his apprenticeship to a tinsmith or a blacksmith, ...