Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.At the very moment that the United States of America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, a remarkable collection of Western American art comes to auction at Christie’s New York. Offered in a sale titled “Visions of the West,” the works come from billionaire collector William I. Koch, and include renowned artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and N. C. Wyeth. The sale’s top lot is Remington’s painting Coming to the Call (ca. 1905), estimated at $6 million to $8 million. If it achieves its low estimate, it will set a new record for a Remington painting.The low estimate for the sale is $50 million, which would double the previous record for an auction of Western American art, achieved at Sotheby’s New York in 1998 for the collection of Texas real estate developer John F. Eulich, with works by artists including Remington. (Adjusted for inflation, the 1998 total of $25 million would be just shy of $50 million today.) The priciest lots go to the block in a January 20 evening sale featuring 25 lots, followed by a daytime auction on January 21, featuring 51 more pieces, with estimates as low as $6,000 and some examples with no reserve. The collection will be on view at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters starting on January 16.As for the anniversary timing, “It seemed appropriate,” Tylee Abbott, head of American art at Christie’s, told ARTnews in a phone conversation. Apart from the semicentennial, popular entertainment has always found plenty of material to mine in the American West, and the recent Paramount+ series Yellowstone and its many spinoffs have kept the era of Westward expansion front and center in pop culture of late. That’s to say nothing of Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s 2024 record, which brought greater attention to the existence of Black cowboys. At the same time, Donald Trump’s administration has on at least one occasion marshaled Western art to help broadcast its racist, jingoistic messages; the Department of Homeland Security posted an image on X last July of John Gast’s painting American Progress (1872), a tableau of Manifest Destiny. The Koch sale comes as part of Americana week at Christie’s; in another sale, the house is also offering printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, a draft of the Constitution, and an Emancipation Proclamation, all estimated at between $3 million and $5 million.Sotheby’s is hoping to match the success of three other sales of similar material in recent years, which, Abbott noted, were the second-, third-, and fourth-highest sales results at auction for Western American art. In 2022, the house sold material from the collection of Carl W. Knobloch Jr., who headed companies in finance, real estate, and oil, for $21.2 million. That sale was led by three canvases by Moran. In 2020, the house sold Western works from the collection of financier and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens for $20.4 million, led by works by N. C. Wyeth, Remington, and Moran. In 2015, another tranche of examples from Koch’s collection fetched a total of $17.2 million, led by yet another Moran.Charles Marion Russell, Dust (1925).Christie'sKoch, an industrialist, scientist, and 1992 winner of the America’s Cup, comes from a family of billionaires who are also philanthropists and supporters of right-wing causes. His twin brother was petroleum billionaire David Koch (1940–2019), owner of Koch Industries and a supporter of Republicans who also gave to institutions including the American Museum of Natural History. Frederick Koch (1933–2020) was his oldest brother; his foundation is a major donor to institutions including the Morgan Library and Museum and the Frick Collection in New York and Yale University’s Beinecke Library.A Showcase for Remington’s Images of Both Cowboys and Native AmericansRemington is a major figure in the sale, which includes no fewer than 17 of his sculptures and paintings; just 48 pieces by the artist came to auction in the entirety of 2025. According to data from art analytics company ARTDAI, the artist’s sell-through rate has exceeded 75 percent every year in the last decade, peaking at 100 percent in both 2017 and 2022.The sale’s top lot is Remington’s painting Coming to the Call (ca. 1905), showing a Native American man in a canoe, pointing a rifle at a moose in a strikingly lit sunset moment, with the sky and water bright yellow. It’s tagged at $6 million to $8 million. If it achieves its low estimate, it will set a new record for a painting. (Remington’s sculptures sell higher at auction, with the current record being $11.2 million. The current high price for a painting, $5.6 million, was set by the 1908 canvas Cutting Out Pony Herds (A Stampede) at Coeur d’Alene Art Auction in Hayden, Idaho, in 2013. That’s his third-highest price at auction, behind two sculptures.) Coming to the Call has been in Koch’s hands since 1984, when it last came to auction at Sotheby’s, and J. N. Bartfield Galleries of New York bought it for him for $500,000. Another of the top lots is Remington’s painting An Argument with the Town Marshall (ca. 1905), which bears a $4 million to $6 million estimate. It last came to auction at Sotheby’s New York in 1994, when Koch bought it for $882,500. It’s one of the artist’s nighttime scenes, collectively referred to as his nocturnes. Frederic Remington, Coming Through the Rye (modeled in 1902 and cast by 1916).Christie'sA posthumous cast of Remington’s sculpture Coming Through the Rye (modeled in 1902 and cast by 1916; the artist died in 1909) is priced at $4 to $6 million. The artist’s $11.2 million auction record was for an earlier casting of Coming Through the Rye (cast in 1906, during the artist’s lifetime), set at Christie’s New York in 2017. The only cast of Remington’s The Horse Thief (modeled in 1907) that remains in private hands, from an edition of just three, is priced at $3 million to $5 million. The others reside in the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the R. W. Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, Louisiana. Koch bought it from J. N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, in 2005. “So it’s now or never,” said Abbott.The first lot in the evening sale is Remington’s The Broncho Buster (modeled in 1895 and cast by 1898), bearing an estimate between $250,000 and $350,000. “It is one of the most archetypal objects ever created in this country and universally appealing,” said Abbott. “It has been in every Oval Office as an emblem of America, with presidents of both parties, since it was created. You can even find someone who only collects French Impressionist art and has a Broncho Buster on their desk.”Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster (modeled in 1895; cast by 1898).Christie'sAnother titan of Western art, Albert Bierstadt, has an undated landscape painting, Mountain Lake, on offer, tagged at $2 million to $3 million; if it achieves its high estimate, it will be among his top five works at auction. The artist’s record is $7.3 million, set at Christie’s New York in 2008 for the landscape Indians spear fishing (1862); that was more than double its $3.5 million high estimate. And yet on this work, Koch seems willing to accept a loss; when he bought it at Sotheby’s New York in 2007, he paid $4.9 million.According to ARTDAI’s data, Bierstadt’s sell-through rate has dipped below 75 percent only once in the last decade, in 2019, and supply has been steady, dropping below 20 works sold annually only once, in 2020.Albert Bierstadt, Mountain Lake (no date).Christie'sAlso on offer are potentially record-breaking works by lesser-known artists. Charles Marion Russell’s current high is $5.6 million, set at Coeur d’Alene in 2005 for his 1918 painting Piegans; coming to the block at Christie’s is Dust (1925), showing a band of Native Americans on horseback and tagged at $5 million to $7 million. Koch bought it in 1985. There is a museum devoted to the artist’s work in Great Falls, Montana.A Niche Market for Western American Art The sale comes at a deeply uncertain moment in the art market overall, but Abbott doesn’t see demand for the Western American niche as being tied too closely to the larger industry’s ups and downs. When the larger art market crashed after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, Western art still made a strong showing, he said.“The American art market had great strength in the ‘90s and the 2000s, with a very dedicated collecting community that was interested in American art from start to finish, in an encyclopedic way,” said Abbott. Back then, he said, many of these collectors could wear cowboy boots and hats and do it honestly. “There has long been a very committed group collecting Western art, many of them based in the West,” he said. “In the last couple of decades there has been an upswell of interest in American art through a combination of bidders based in the West and coastal clients acquiring homes in the West.” Now, you might find a collector who hangs a Warhol at their New York home and a Remington at their Montana property, he said.That’s not the only thing connecting New York and the West, at least in Abbott’s mind. Newell Convers Wyeth, Wild Bill Hickok at the Cards (1916).Christie's“When these works were being made,” he said, “they were contemporary art and these artists were at the forefront of art production in America, painting in a progressive way that was fitting with modern tastes and styles that were popular in New York.”Several works in Koch’s holdings passed through the hands of New York’s J. N. Bartfield Galleries, founded in 1937 and focusing on American, Western, and sporting art. Michael Frost, Bartfield’s nephew, now owns the business, as well as Scottsdale Art Auction in Arizona, which focuses on this material and boasts over $260 million in sales.“People who have great Impressionist collections do have some Western works,” Frost said in a phone call. “Remington’s later pieces, after about 1905, became very loose and Impressionistic. He died at 49, and nobody knows where he would have gone” in terms of his style had he lived longer, he said.Frost noted some of the great Western art collectors have included Philip Anschutz, an oil, real estate and telecoms magnate who in 2010 founded the American Museum of Western Art in Denver, and cattleman William Foxley, whose collection has gone on view at institutions including the Joslyn Art Museum and the Palm Springs Desert Museum.The Anschutz name is emblazoned as a supporter on several American art galleries at the recently reopened Princeton University Art Museum, where this area is overseen by curator Karl Kusserow and includes a Remington Coming Through the Rye bronze on display alongside one of his nocturne paintings. “Most of his nocturnes depict Native Americans,” said Kusserow. “That was his way of suggesting the evanescence, as people thought, of Native American culture, which they saw as fading into darkness.”There are a few museums, such as the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, that focus on this material, Kusserow said, but he anticipates the bidders will come more from the private sector. “It’s an impressive collection,” Kusserow acknowledged. He called Remington’s Coming to the Call “a pretty famous image and one which in a nice way distills a lot of the busyness of Remington’s earlier bustling scenes of carousing cowboys into something more elemental and contemplative.”Curators and art historians have turned a revisionist eye to Western art, he observed, most notably with the show “The West As America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. in 1991, featuring artists including Bierstadt, Remington, and Moran.“That in a way set the stage or began the reinterpretation of this sort of art from the perspective of social history that looks more closely at power and race,” said Kusserow, “and tries to see the hidden truth behind a lot of these images.”