Modern Age
Frederic Remington (1861–1909)
American Art of the Old West painter.
Frederic Sackrider Remington was the artist who fixed the popular image of the American Old West. Born in Canton, New York, in 1861, he studied briefly at the School of Fine Arts at Yale before heading west in his early twenties, prospecting and ranching in Kansas and travelling widely across the frontier. Those firsthand observations became the raw material of a phenomenally productive career as a magazine illustrator: through the 1880s and 1890s he supplied hundreds of drawings to Harper's Weekly and later to Collier's Weekly, becoming the nation's foremost visual reporter of cavalry campaigns, cowboys, and the Plains peoples.
His great subjects were the horse in violent motion, the mounted soldier and cowboy, and the vanishing world of the open range, treated with a reporter's insistence on accurate gear, tack, and dress. He was also a sculptor: his first bronze, The Broncho Buster (1895), and later The Cheyenne translated that same kinetic energy into three dimensions, and the Denver Art Museum's Petrie Institute of Western American Art holds casts of both. In his last decade, working from his home in New Rochelle, New York, Remington turned from black-and-white illustration to ambitious fine-art painting, adopting brighter, more impressionistic color and a celebrated series of moonlit nocturnes.
Remington died in 1909, at forty-eight, of complications from appendicitis. Together with Charles M. Russell he is regarded as one of the two defining chroniclers of the Old West. His paintings anchor the great Western collections, among them the Anschutz Collection at the American Museum of Western Art in Denver, which holds A Cold Morning on the Range.
The words the record keeps using: rugged, vigorous, documentary, energetic, elegiac, atmospheric, authentic.
At a glance
- Lived 1861–1909
- Origin American
- Worked in New York
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Art of the Old West
- Mediums Oil on panel, Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Oil sketch (modello)
Works in the archive
- A Dash for the Timber, 1889 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth)
A band of cowboys gallops straight at the viewer at full stretch, firing back over their shoulders at pursuing Native riders as they race for the cover of the timber. This large 1889 canvas established Remington's… - The Fall of the Cowboy, 1895 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth)
Two cowboys pause at a barbed-wire fence gate on a bleak winter range, one still mounted, one dismounted to work the wire. Painted in 1895 to illustrate Owen Wister's essay on the passing of the cowboy, it is… - The Scout: Friends or Foes?, 1902 (Clark Art Institute, Williamstown)
A lone Native American scout sits his horse on a snow-covered rise at dusk, watching distant riders and weighing whether they are friends or enemies. Painted about 1902–1905, it is one of Remington's mature nocturnal… - A Cold Morning on the Range, 1904 (American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection, Denver)
A cowboy fights to stay astride a bucking horse on a frosty range at first light while other riders and mounts stir in the cold. Painted about 1904, it is a signature Remington subject — the wild energy of the…
What was said
Remington recalled that even as a young man in the West he sensed the wild riders, the open land, and the soldiers and Native peoples he saw were about to vanish, and he resolved to record that world before it disappeared for good.
Having built his reputation as a field illustrator for Harper's Weekly, Remington prided himself on documentary accuracy — correct horses, tack, weapons, and cavalry and Native dress drawn from firsthand observation in the West.
In his last decade Remington moved beyond illustration toward fine-art painting, adopting higher-keyed, impressionistic color and a celebrated series of nocturnes whose broad, atmospheric handling favored mood over anecdote.
Lineage
Learned from George Catlin
Passed on to Charles M. Russell, Charles Schreyvogel
What would Frederic make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Frederic Remington", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Frederic · Keep a life moment the way Frederic would · Pictures made after Frederic