The Sid Richardson Museum can’t compete with other major museums in the area in terms of size and breadth of collection. But the pieces that Texas oil tycoon Sid Richardson amassed in his lifetime fills a niche in the North Texas art scene. The museum draws more than 50,000 visitors annually to its Sundance Square location.
Until his death in 1959, Sid Richardson was a prominent collector of Western art, focusing especially on the works of Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, which comprise a majority of the museum’s collection. The museum owns more than 50 paintings and artifacts by Russell and nearly two dozen works by Remington, including four of the 17 paintings from Remington’s 1909 exhibition in New York City just before his death. Paintings by Western artists such as Gilbert Gaul, Charles Browne, William Robinson Leigh, and a handful of others are also on display.
Richardson tended to shy away from the landscapes and portraiture of many Western painters, instead favoring paintings full of action or suspense that depict scenes from gun battles, hunts, and horse rides.