A short distance northwest of Atlanta there are two sights that interested me to see - Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield in Cobb County and the Booth Museum of Western Art in Cartersville. Kennesaw Mountain is a significant hill a short distance northwest of Marietta from which a panoramic view of Atlanta is possible. The hill and the area around it were the sight of a significant Civil War battle in June 1864 after the Union forces victory at Chattanooga as part of General Sherman's campaign through northwestern Georgia to capture Atlanta and continue onwards towards the sea. There’s a road to the summit of Kennesaw Mountain, but it’s closed on weekends when the park is mobbed with suburbanites enjoying the outdoors, so I got some exercise for the day. You can see Atlanta’s skyscraper’s from the top, although it’s far enough away from Atlanta that I doubt they saw much of the city during the Civil War when everything was just a few stories tall.

I love artistic depictions of the American West, both historical and contemporary works . I can look at paintings of great landscapes, cowboys and Indians, and frontier life all day long, so I try to find it wherever I can. There’s quite a lot in some major museums like the Denver Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum, Jocelyn Museum, and Gilcrease Museum, as well as Smithsonian American Art Museum and Metropolitan Museum. But there’s also a substantial amount of the genre in several smaller museums with a specialized focus, not all of which are in West, places like Corning and Ogdensburg, New York and Cartersville, GA.

The Booth Museum has quite a mix, some by the old masters - famous names from George Catlin through Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, and the Taos Circle. The Booth also has large galleries of modern western art themes, American Indian artifacts, and a Civil War gallery. The collection includes lots of art from painters of last few decades in the realist to impressionist styles of a century ago that are not famous names. Some of those paintings, though, are very impressive and stand their own alongside those by more recognized masters.