File:In his studio and art gallery in tiny Hulett, Wyoming, celebrated western artist Bob Coronato stands beside his most famous and controversial painting, of American Indian activist Russell Means LCCN2015634179.tif

English: Title: In his studio and art gallery in tiny Hulett, Wyoming, celebrated western artist Bob Coronato stands beside his most famous and controversial painting, of American Indian activist Russell Means

Physical description: 1 photograph : digital, tiff file, color.

Notes: Forms part of: Gates Frontiers Fund Wyoming Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive.; Credit line: Gates Frontiers Fund Wyoming Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.; Best known for his paintings of western Americana, cowboys, and American Indian life and culture, Coronato is commissioned to produce distinctive, meticulously realistic rodeo posters throughout the West. He was a small-town easterner who moved to California to study art. On vacation in Spearfish, South Dakota, Coronato became enamored of, and soon immersed in, western art. According to one account, Coronato preceded to torture his instructors by turning every assignment into Western subject matter oil on canvas. If the assignment was to paint an advertisement for an automobile, Coronato would paint a covered wagon. Deciding that he must soak in real cowboy culture to paint it, he moved in with a saddlemaker in desolate eastern Wyoming. His older friend housed and encouraged Coronato, who worked on the range with Wyoming cowboys and spent time on several Indian reservations in the Upper Plains. In 2009 when Coronato was 39, the New York Post newspaper described him as "the Leonardo da Vinci of Cowboy Art."; Title, date and keywords based on information provided by the photographer.; Purchase; Carol M. Highsmith Photography, Inc.; 2015; (DLC/PP-2015:069).