Previously the Torch Collection of Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated, the Visions of the West is the assembly of important art, artifacts and archives from western North America collected by J.P. Bryan throughout his 30-year career in the energy industry. Visions includes pieces from the Torch Collection of Torch Energy Advisors Incorporated, the private assemblies of Mr. Bryan, the Bryan Texana Foundation, and the historic Gage Hotel.

Torch Energy’s founder J.P. Bryan started collecting in 1969, when he began amassing rare and first-edition books, documents and maps about Texas and the desert Southwest. Included are histories of the Spanish in the New World, early Texas, extensive Galveston material, early Texas currency and periodicals, a postal history and Stephen F. Austin papers.

The Collection expanded significantly in 1988 when Torch Energy moved its offices to spacious headquarters in downtown Houston. Purchases grew to include fine and decorative art, antique equestrian gear and American firearms, Civil and Indian War militaria, textiles, vintage and contemporary photography, Mexican religious art, pre-Columbiana and costumes. The fine art spans regional art history from 1850-1950, including itinerant and military artists; topographers; landscape painters; Santa Fe, Taos and Dallas Nine artists; Texas modernists and untrained artists. The Collection now covers such seemingly disparate areas as reservation-period beading of Native peoples, ephemeral festival art of Mexico, artworks by trained and untrained artists, New World exploration maps and immigrant accounts of early Texas.