Frederic Remington

The name Frederic Remington (1861–1909) evokes images of cowboys and Indians that reflect the heroic past of the Old West. Romantic and nostalgic, Remington’s numerous illustrations, paintings, and bronze sculptures celebrated Americanness at a time of heightened immigration, Fredrick Jackson Turner’s claim that the western frontier was fading away, and the replacement of the horse by trains, and, eventually, the automobile. The career of Teddy Roosevelt—the ultimate outdoorsman and roughrider—was in ascendancy. This was a man’s world: rough, rugged, and individualistic.

Although Remington has often been called the “quintessential artist of the West,” his roots, residences, and audience were in the East. The son of a Civil War cavalry soldier, he was born in Canton, New York, and for much of his life he returned to the area, enjoying a summer retreat in the Thousand Islands. Beginning at age fourteen, he attended the Vermont Episcopal Institute in Burlington, before enrolling at the Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He then went on to study art at Yale University where he also played football, but did not stay for long, bored by the requirements to draw from plaster casts. After a few attempts at sheep ranching and running a saloon in Kansas, he returned to New York and, beginning in 1886, took classes at the Art Students League.

For most of his prolific career, he maintained homes and studios in the New York metropolitan area, moving in 1890 to New Rochelle, and, in 1909, shortly before his death from appendicitis, he established himself in Ridgefield, Connecticut. When he needed to study the anatomy of a buffalo, he went to the Bronx Zoo. Remington made his first trip west in 1881, just as the railroad was transforming the frontier. Later, he recalled an encounter he had with an old frontiersman: “I was nineteen years of age and he was a very old man… during his life he had followed the receding frontier. … ‘And now,’ he said, ‘there is no more West. In a few years the railroad will come along the Yellowstone. …’ I knew the railroad was coming… the derby hat, the smoking chimney, the cord-binder, and the thirty day note… I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever… Without knowing exactly how to do it I began to try to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded… The living, breathing end of three American centuries.” [1]

Starting out as an illustrator, Remington recorded the Old West in numerous drawings, which appeared on a regular basis in Harper’s Weekly, Collier’s, and other illustrated magazines. His images were action-packed, showing war, and conflicts between white men and Indians. Initially these were reproduced in black and white, but as the technology improved, they were done in color and sold as individual prints. Men and horses dominate over landscape. In the 1890s he moved away from illustration, trying to establish himself as a fine artist. He adopted an impressionistic style for his oils, and in 1894 turned to bronze sculpture for depictions of horsemen and their mounts. His late paintings are characterized by a sense of mortality and are often evocative moonlit scenes. In addition to producing almost three thousand works of art, Remington, ever the storyteller, authored many articles and eight novels set in the West.

To easterners and foreigners, Remington portrayed the archetypical cowboy. On his numerous western trips—in 1890 alone he took three—he came to admire the men who wrangled cattle and drove steers to market. He wrote his wife: “The cowboys whom I meet—many are quiet, determined, and very courteous and pleasant to talk to. There is none of your Dodge City stock here. Their persons show wear and exposure and all together they look more as though they followed cattle than the pursuit of pleasure. Such lined and grizzled and sun-scorched faces are really quite unique.” [2] Working during the “Golden Age of Illustration,” Remington gained widespread recognition, but was frustrated by what he viewed as the ephemeral nature of his output. He saw bronze sculpture as a means to gain immortality: “My watercolors will fade—but I am to endure in bronze—even rust does not touch it.” [3]

Notes:

[1] Remington, “Remington Number,” Collier’s Weekly, March 18, 1905, quoted in Frederic Remington, Frederic Remington’s Own West, ed. by Harold McCracken (New York: Promontory Press, 1960), 172.

[2] Remington to Eva Remington, Sunday 11 Tuesday, 1888, quoted in Allen Splete and Marilyn Splete, Frederic Remington: Selected Letters (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 55.

[3] Remington to Owen Wister, quoted in Ben Merchant Vorphal, My Dear Wister: The Frederic Remington–Owen Wister Letters (Palo Alto, CA: American West, 1972), 160, quoted in Michael Shapiro, Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981), 40.