Crazy over Horses

"It is not how a picture is painted that matters," says Painter William Robinson Leigh, "it is what you paint." Tall, lean and full of such old-fashioned convictions, Artist Leigh, at 86, knows just what he likes to paint. Says he: "Never in the whole of human history at any time or anywhere has there been a terrain more suitable for the making of pictures and telling of stories than our own West." On display this week in a Manhattan gallery is a retrospective show of Leigh's Wild West pictures, which prove him a first-rate practitioner of the Western school made famous by his late great contemporaries Frederic Remington and Charles Russell.

Like Remington and Russell, Leigh is crazy over horses. And he has a true Westerner's bias in favor of the working breed. "As for those tired old nags at the rodeo," says he, "they don't know the first thing about bucking." No one could say that about Leigh's recently painted range horse (opposite). "Like a bolt of lightning," as Leigh himself describes it, "the wily equine flies into the air with a volcanic suddenness--with a fantastic violence and rabid spleen that defy description."

Starting with Sky. Born in West Virginia, Leigh studied art for twelve years in Munich under a succession of adept nature painters named Rauff, Gsis, Loeftz and Lindenschmidt. They taught him to make a detailed charcoal sketch on canvas and paint over it, starting with the sky ("If there are no clouds, the sky may take no more than a day") and working toward the foreground, finishing each part separately. Such grandiose subjects as sunsets and stampedes, he learned, may take up to six months to finish. But for Leigh, the finished result, an almost photographic naturalism, is well worth the effort.

Not until 1906, when he was 40, did Artist Leigh go West. He did it then by persuading the Santa Fe Railroad to give him a free ticket in return for a painting of the Grand Canyon. The company ordered five more Grand Canyon pictures on the strength of the first, and between his Can yon commissions, Leigh roamed the vast, raw, neighboring country on horseback, sketching as he went.

Since then, he has made more than 25 trips to Arizona, New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, learning at firsthand the ways of Indians and cowhands. He also sandwiched in two trips to Africa with expeditions for Manhattan's Museum of Natural History, came back to paint the famed three-dimensional backdrops for the museum's displays of stuffed African mammals.

Ending with Absinthe. As might be expected, Leigh looks on modern art with loathing and dismay. His conclusion: it is all an indirect result of absinthe-drinking in mid-19th century France, which "ate away the brains of the French aristocracy and brought vulgar folk into control of the salons and everything else." The vulgar folk, Leigh reasons, thought everything that was different was good, and they slowly imposed their love of novelty and disdain for nature-painting on the whole world of art. Some of today's artists, huffs Painter Leigh, bristling his snowy mustache, have sunk to "vicious imbecility."

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