Growing up in the 1930s, German supermarket billionaire Erivan Haub devoured the Wild West novels of Karl May

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Tacoma Art Museum, Promised gift of Erivan and Helga Haub

Frederic Remington's 'Conjuring Back the Buffalo' is going to the Tacoma Art Museum.

Growing up in the 1930s, German supermarket billionaire Erivan Haub devoured the Wild West novels of Karl May, his country's counterpart to James Fenimore Cooper. Now Mr. Haub and his wife, Helga, are giving the bulk of their collection of Western art to the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington state. The couple is also funding most of a $15 million project to add a lobby and a museum wing to display it all.

The 280 pieces in the gift include works by major Western artists Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. Collectively, the works chronicle the Western sweep of Manifest Destiny—from portraits of Native American chiefs to cowboys astride horses to sun-drenched vistas.

Many of the works are by 19th-century European painters who fell hard for the American West, whether or not they ever actually visited the region. The terrain they conjured on canvas is largely grand and unspoiled. The gem is "Green River, Wyoming," by Moran, a self-taught painter from England who later crisscrossed the West to paint his epic landscapes. Moran's 1907 scene shows a band of Indians riding toward the river as terracotta-colored rocks loom on the opposite bank.