Frederic Remington

Frederic Sackrider Remington was born in 1861 in Canton, in upstate New York, the son of a newspaper publisher who served as a cavalry officer in the Civil War. He grew up drawing soldiers and horses. He studied for a short time at the Yale School of Fine Arts, where he also played on the football team, but he left after his father died in 1880.

At nineteen he made his first trip west, to Montana. He then tried his hand at sheep ranching in Kansas, and when that failed, he travelled through the Southwest and the Plains, sketching cowboys, cavalry troopers and Native Americans. He returned east determined to make a living from what he had seen.

Success came through illustration. From the mid-1880s his drawings appeared in Harper's Weekly, Outing and Century Magazine, and he illustrated books including an 1890 edition of Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha and Theodore Roosevelt's articles on ranch life. Editors sent him back west many times on assignment, including to cover the army's campaigns on the Plains. By the end of the decade he was one of the best-known illustrators in the country.

Many of the works in our collection come from this period of illustration and history painting, full of horses, soldiers and danger. In The Advance Guard (1888) and A Dash for the Timber (1889), cavalry and cowboys ride for their lives. Aiding a Comrade (1890) and Dismounted: The Fourth Troopers Moving the Led Horses (1890) also show his gift for drawing horses in motion. Friends or Foes? (The Scout) (1902) is a quieter, moodier picture.

In 1895 Remington made his first bronze sculpture, The Bronco Buster, a cowboy clinging to a rearing horse. It became one of the most famous American sculptures, and he went on to make more than twenty bronzes.

In his last years he set out to be taken seriously as a painter rather than an illustrator. He loosened his brushwork, brightened his colour under the influence of the Impressionists, and painted many night scenes in moonlight and firelight. On the Southern Plains (1907), with its charging line of cavalry, belongs to these last years.

Remington died in 1909, aged forty-eight, after an emergency operation for appendicitis, just as critics were beginning to praise his new work. The Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody hold large collections of his work.