Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 - December 26, 1909) was an
American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in
depictions of the Old American West,
Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 - December 26, 1909) was an
American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in
depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last
quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American
Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry.
Early life
Remington was born in Canton, New York in 1861 to Seth Pierrepont Remington
and Clarissa Bascom Sackrider, whose family owned hardware stores and emigrated
from Alsace-Lorraine in the early 1700’s.[1] Remington’s father was a colonel in
the Civil War whose family arrived in the United States from England in 1637. He
was a newspaper editor and postmaster, and the family was active in local
politics and staunchly Republican. One of Remington’s great grandfathers, Samuel
Bascom, was a saddle maker by trade, and the Remingtons were fine horsemen.
Frederic Remington was related by family bloodlines to Indian portrait artist
George Catlin and cowboy sculptor Earl W. Bascom.
Colonel Remington was away at war during most of the first four years of his
son’s life. After the war, he moved his family to Bloomington, Illinois for a
brief time and was appointed editor of the Bloomington Republican, but the
family returned to Canton in 1867.[2] Remington was the only child of the
marriage, and received constant attention and approval. He was an active child,
large and strong for his age, who loved to hunt, swim, ride, and go camping. He
was a poor student, though, particularly in math, which did not bode well for
his father’s ambitions for his son to attend West Point. He began to make
drawings and sketches of soldiers and cowboys at an early age.
The family moved to Ogdensburg, New York when Remington was eleven and he
attended Vermont Episcopal Institute, a church-run military school, where his
father hoped discipline would rein in his son’s lack of focus, and perhaps lead
to a military career. Remington took his first drawing lessons at the Institute.
He then transferred to another military school where his classmates found the
young Remington to be a pleasant fellow, a bit careless and lazy, good-humored,
and generous of spirit, but definitely not soldier material.[3] He enjoyed
making caricatures and silhouettes of his classmates. At sixteen, he wrote to
his uncle of his modest ambitions, “I never intend to do any great amount of
labor. I have but one short life and do not aspire to wealth or fame in a degree
which could only be obtained by an extraordinary effort on my part”.[4] He
imagined a career for himself as a journalist, with art as a sideline.
Remington attended the art school at Yale University, the only male in the
freshman year. However, he found that football and boxing were more interesting
than the formal art training, particularly drawing from casts and still life
objects. He preferred action drawing and his first published illustration was a
cartoon of a “bandaged football player” for the student newspaper Yale
Courant.[5]. Though he was not a star player, his participation on the strong
Yale football team was a great source of pride for Remington and his family. He
left Yale in 1879 to tend to his ailing father who had tuberculosis. His father
died a year later, at age forty-six, receiving respectful recognition from the
citizens of Ogdensburg. Remington’s Uncle Mart secured a good paying clerical
job for his nephew in Albany, New York and Remington would return home on
weekends to see his girlfriend Eva Caten. After the rejection of his engagement
proposal to Eva by her father, Remington became a reporter for his Uncle Mart’s
newspaper, then went on to other short-lived jobs.
Living off his inheritance and modest work income, Remington refused to go
back to art school and instead spent time camping and enjoying himself. At
nineteen, he made his first trip west, going to Montana, at first to buy a
cattle operation then a mining interest but realized he did not have sufficient
capital for either. In the Ol’ West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the
quickly shrinking buffalo herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major
confrontations of U.S. Cavalry and native American tribes, scenes he had
imagined since his childhood. Though the trip was undertaken as a lark, it gave
Remington a more authentic view of the West than some of the later artists and
writers who followed in his footsteps, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey, who
arrived twenty-five years later when the Ol’ West had slipped into history. From
that first trip, Harper's Weekly published Remington’s first published
commercial effort, a re-drawing of a quick sketch on wrapping paper that he had
mailed back East.[6] In 1883, Remington went to Peabody, Kansas to try his hand
at the booming sheep ranching and wool trade, as one of the “holiday stockmen”,
rich young Easterners out to make a quick killing as ranch owners. He invested
his entire inheritance but Remington found ranching to be a rough, boring,
isolated occupation which deprived him of the finer things of Eastern life, and
the real ranchers thought him a lazy playboy.[7]
Remington continued sketching but at this point his results were still
cartoonish and amateurish. After less than a year, he sold his ranch and went
home. After acquiring more capital from his mother, he returned to Kansas City
to start a hardware business, but due to an alleged swindle it failed, and he
reinvested his remaining money as a silent, half owner of a saloon. He went home
to marry Eva Caten in 1884 and they returned to Kansas City immediately. She was
unhappy with his saloon life and was unimpressed by the sketches of saloon
inhabitants that Remington regularly showed her. When his real occupation became
known, she left her husband and returned to Ogdensburg.[8] With his wife gone
and with business doing badly, Remington started to sketch and paint in earnest,
and bartered his sketches for essentials.
He soon had enough success selling his paintings to locals to see art as a
real profession. Remington returned home again, his inheritance gone but his
faith in his new career secured, reunited with his wife and moved to Brooklyn.
He began studies at the Art Students League of New York and significantly
bolstered his fresh though still rough technique. His timing was excellent as
newspaper interest in the dying West was escalating. He submitted illustrations,
sketches, and other works for publication with Western themes to Collier's and
Harper's Weekly, as his recent Western experiences (highly exaggerated) and his
hearty, breezy “cowboy” demeanor gained him credibility with the eastern
publishers looking for authenticity.[9] His first full page cover under his own
name appeared in Harper's Weekly on January 9, 1886, when he was twenty-five.
With financial backing from his Uncle Bill, Remington was able to pursue his art
career and support his wife.
Early career
In 1886, Remington was sent to Arizona by Harper's Weekly on a commission as
an artist-correspondent to cover the government’s war against Geronimo. Although
he never caught up with Geronimo, Remington did acquire many authentic artifacts
to be used later as props, and made many photos and sketches valuable for later
paintings. He also made notes on the true colors of the West, such as “shadows
of horses should be a cool carmine & Blue”, to supplement the black and white
photos. Ironically, art critics later criticized his palette as “primitive and
unnatural” even though it was based on actual observation.[10]
After returning back East, Remington was sent by Harper's Weekly to cover the
Charleston, South Carolina earthquake of 1886. To expand his commission work, he
also began doing drawings for Outing magazine. His first year as a commercial
artist had been successful, earning Remington $1,200, almost triple that of a
typical teacher.[11] He had found his life’s work and bragged to a friend,
“That’s a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher to come to New York with $30
and catch on it ‘art’." [12]
For commercial reproduction in black-and-white, he produced ink and wash
drawings. As he added watercolor, he began to sell his work in art exhibitions.
His works were selling well but garnered no prizes, as the competition was
strong and masters like Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson were considered his
superiors. A trip to Canada in 1887, produced illustrations of the Blackfeet,
the Crows, and the Canadian Mounties, eagerly enjoyed by the reading public.
Later that year, Remington received a commission to do eighty-three
illustrations for a book by Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting
Trail, to be serialized in The Century Magazine before publication.[13] The
twenty-five year old Roosevelt had a similar Western adventure to Remington,
losing money on a ranch in North Dakota the previous year but gaining experience
which made him an “expert” on the West. The assignment gave Remington’s career a
big boost and forged a lifelong connection with Roosevelt.
His full-color oil painting Return of the Blackfoot War Party was exhibited at
the National Academy of Design and the New York Herald commented that Remington
would “one day be listed among our great American painters”.[14] Though not
admired by all critics, Remington’s work was deemed “distinctive” and “modern”.
By now, he was demonstrating the ability to handle complex compositions with
ease, as in Mule Train Crossing the Sierras (1888), and to show action from all
points of view[15] His status as the new trendsetter in Western art was
solidified in 1889 when he won a second-class medal at the Paris Exposition. He
had been selected by the American committee to represent American painting, over
Albert Bierstadt whose majestic, large-scale landscapes peopled with tiny
figures of pioneers and Indians was now considered passé.
Cowboy on Horseback
Shotgun Hospitality - 1908
Around this
time, Remington made a gentleman’s agreement with Harper's Weekly, giving the
magazine an informal first option on his output but maintaining Remington’s
independence to sell elsewhere if desired. As a bonus, the magazine launched a
massive promotional campaign for Remington, stating that “He draws what he
knows, and he knows what he draws.” Though laced with blatant puffery (common
for the time) claiming that Remington was a bona fide cowboy and Indian scout,
the effect of the campaign was to raise Remington to the equal of the era’s top
illustrators, Howard Pyle and Charles Dana Gibson.[16]
His first one-man show, in 1890, presented twenty-one paintings at the American
Art Galleries and was very well received. With success all but assured,
Remington became established in society. His personality, his “pseudo-cowboy”
speaking manner, and “Wild West” reputation were strong social attractions. His
biography falsely promoted some of the myths he encouraged about his Western
experiences.[17]
Remington’s regular attendance at celebrity banquets and stag dinners, however,
though helpful to his career, fostered prodigious eating and drinking which
caused his girth to expand alarmingly. Obesity became a constant problem for him
from then on. Among his urban friends and fellow artists, he was “a man among
men, a deuce of a good fellow” but notable because he (facetiously) “never drew
but two women in his life, and they were failures” (not counting Indian
women).[18] In 1890, Remington moved to posh New Rochelle, New York to his new
estate “Endion”, in order to have both more living space and extensive studio
facilities, and also with the hope of gaining more exercise.
Mature career
Remington’s fame made him a favorite of the Western Army officers fighting
the last Indian battles. He was invited out West to make their portraits in the
field and to gain them national publicity through Remington’s articles and
illustrations for Harper's Weekly, particularly General Nelson Miles, an
Indian fighter who aspired to the presidency of the United States.[19]
In turn, Remington got exclusive access to the soldiers and their stories, and
boosted his reputation with the reading public as “The Soldier Artist”.
Remington arrived on the scene just after the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in which
over 300 Sioux were slaughtered and which he reported it as “The Sioux Outbreak
in South Dakota”, praising the Army’s ”heroic” actions in dealing with the
Indians.[20] Some of the Miles
paintings are monochromatic and have an almost “you-are-there” photographic
quality, heightening the realism, as in The Parley (1898)[21]
Remington’s Self-Portrait on a Horse (1890) shows the artist as he
wished he was, not the pot-bellied Easterner weighing heavily on a horse, but a
tough, lean cowboy heading for adventure with his trusty steed. It was the image
his publishers worked hard to maintain as well. In His Last Stand (1890),
a cornered bear in the middle of a prairie is brought down by dogs and riflemen,
which may have been a symbolized treatment of the dying Indians he had
witnessed. Remington’s attitude toward Native Americans was typical for the
time. He thought them unfathomable, fearless, superstitious, ignorant, and
pitiless—and generally portrayed them as such. White men under attack were brave
and noble.
Through the 1890’s, Remington took frequent trips around the U.S., Mexico,
and abroad to gather ideas for articles and illustrations, but his military and
cowboy subjects always sold the best, even as the Old West was playing out.
Gradually, he transitioned from the premiere chronicler-artist of the Old West
to its most important historian-artist. He formed an effective partnership with
Owen Wister, who became the leading writer of Western stories at the time.
Having more confidence of his craft, Remington wrote, “ My drawing is done
entirely from memory. I never use a camera now. The interesting never occurs in
nature as a whole, but in pieces. It’s more what I leave out than what I add.”[22]
Remington’s focus continued on outdoor action and he rarely depicted scenes in
gambling and dance halls typically seen in Western movies. He avoids frontier
women as well. His painting A Misdeal (1897) is a rare instance of indoor
cowboy violence.[23]
The Bronco Buster, limited edition #17 of 20 - 1909.
Cowboys on Horse - 1895
Remington’s had developed a sculptor’s 360 degree sense of vision but until a
chance remark by playwright Augustus Thomas in 1895, Remington had not yet
conceived of himself as a sculptor and thought of it as a separate art for which
he had no training or aptitude.[24] With help from friend and sculptor Frederick
Ruckstuhl, Remington constructed his first armature and clay model, a “bronco
buster” where the horse is reared on its hind legs—technically a very
challenging subject. After several months, the novice sculptor overcame the
difficulties and had a plaster cast made, then bronze copies, which were sold at
Tiffany’s. Remington was ecstatic about his new line of work, and though
critical response was mixed, some labelling it negatively as “illustrated
sculpture”, it was a successful first effort earning him $6,000 over three
years.[25]
During that busy year, Remington became further immersed in military matters,
inventing a new type of ammunition carrier; but his patented invention was not
accepted for use by the War Department.[26] His favorite subject for magazine
illustration was now military scenes, though he admitted, “Cowboys are cash with
me”.[27] Sensing the political mood of that time, he was looking forward to a
military conflict which would provide the opportunity to be a heroic war
correspondent, giving me both new subject matter and the excitement of battle.
He was growing bored with routine illustration, and he wrote to Howard Pyle, the
dean of American illustrators, that he had “done nothing but potboil of
late”.[28] (Earlier, he and Pyle in a gesture of mutual respect had exchanged
paintings—Pyle’s painting of a dead pirate for Remington’s of a rough and ready
cowpuncher). He was still working very hard, spending seven days a week in his
studio.[29]
Remington was further irritated by the lack of his acceptance to regular
membership by the Academy, likely due to his image as a popular, cocky, and
ostentatious artist.[30] Remington kept up his contact with celebrities and
politicos, and continued to woo Theodore Roosevelt, now the New York City Police
Commissioner, by sending him complimentary editions of new works. Despite
Roosevelt’s great admiration for Remington, he never purchased a Remington
painting or drawing.[31]
Remington’s association with Roosevelt paid off, however, when the artist became
a war correspondent and illustrator during the Spanish-American War in 1898,
sent to provide illustrations for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. He
witnessed the assault on San Juan Hill by American forces, including those led
by Roosevelt. However, his heroic conception of war, based in part on his
father’s Civil War experiences, were shattered by the actual horror of jungle
fighting and the deprivations he faced in camp. His reports and illustrations
upon his return focused not on heroic generals but on the troops, as in his
Scream of the Shrapnel (1899), which depicts a deadly ambush on American troops
by an unseen enemy.[32] When the Rough Riders returned to the U.S., they
presented their courageous leader Roosevelt with Remington’s bronze statuette,
The Bronco Buster, which the artist proclaimed, “the greatest compliment I ever
had…After this everything will be mere fuss.” Roosevelt responded, “There could
have been no more appropriate gift from such a regiment.”[33]
In 1888, he achieved the public honor of having two paintings used for
reproduction on U. S. Postal stamps.[34] In 1900, as an economy move, Harper’s
dropped Remington as their star artist. To compensate for the loss of work,
Remington wrote and illustrated a full-length novel, The Way of an Indian, which
was intended for serialization by a Hearst publication but not published until
five years later in Cosmopolitan. Remington’s protagonist, a Cheyenne named Fire
Eater, is a prototype Native American as viewed by Remington and many of his
time.[35]
Remington then returned to sculpture, and produced his first works produced by
the lost wax method, a higher quality process than the earlier sand casting
method he had employed.[36] By 1901, Collier's was buying Remington’s
illustrations on a steady basis. As his style matured, Remington portrayed his
subjects in every light of day. His nocturnal paintings, very popular in his
late life, such as A Taint on the Wind and Scare in the Pack Train, are more
impressionistic and loosely painted, and focus on the unseen threat.
Remington completed another novel in 1902, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, a
modest success but a definite disappointment as it was completely overshadowed
by the best seller The Virginian, written by his sometime collaborator Owen
Wister, which became a classic Western novel. A stage play based on “John
Ermine” failed in 1904. After “John Ermine”, Remington decided he would soon
quit writing and illustration (after drawing over 2700 illustrations) to focus
on sculpture and painting.[37]
In 1905, Remington had a major publicity coup when Collier's devoted an entire
issue to the artist and his art, showcasing his latest works. His large outdoor
sculpture of a “Big Cowboy”, which stands on the East River Drive in
Philadelphia, was another late success. His “Explorers” series, depicting older
historical events in western U.S. history, did not fair well with the public or
the critics.[38] The financial panic of 1907 caused a slow down in his sales and
in 1908, fantasy artists, such as Maxfield Parrish, became popular with the
public and with commercial sponsors.[39] Remington tried to sell his home in New
Rochelle to get further away from urbanization. One night he made a bonfire in
his yard and burned dozens of his oil paintings which had been used for magazine
illustration (worth millions of dollars today), making an emphatic statement
that he was done with illustration forever. He wrote, “there is nothing left but
my landscape studies”.[40] Near the end of his life, he moved to Ridgefield,
Connecticut. In his final two years, under the influence of The Ten, he was
veering more heavily to Impressionism, and he regretted that he was studio bound
(by virtue of his declining health) and could not follow his peers who painted
“plein air”.[41]
Frederic Remington died after an emergency appendectomy led to peritonitis on
December 26, 1909. His extreme obesity (weight nearly 300 lbs.) had complicated
the anesthesia and the surgery, and chronic appendicitis was cited in the
post-mortem examination as an underlying factor in his death.[42]
The Frederick Remington House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
Style and influence
The Scout - Friends or Foes - c. 1900
Remington was the most successful Western illustrator in the “Golden Age” of
illustration at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th
Century, so much so that the other Western artists such as Charles Russell and
Charles Schreyvogel were known during Remington’s life as members of the “School
of Remington”.[43] His style was naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic, and
usually veered away from the ethnographic realism of earlier Western artists
such as George Catlin. His focus was firmly on the people and animals of the
West, with landscape usually of secondary importance, unlike the members and
descendants of the Hudson River School, such as Frederick Church, Albert
Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, who glorified the vastness of the West and the
dominance of nature over man. He took artistic liberties in his depictions of
human action, and for the sake of his readers’ and publishers’ interest. Though
always confident in his subject matter, Remington was less sure about his
colors, and critics often harped on his palette, but his lack of confidence
drove him to experiment and produce a great variety of effects, some very true
to nature and some imagined.
His collaboration with Owen Wister on The Evolution of the Cowpuncher, published
by Harper’s Monthly in September 1893, was the first statement of the mythical
cowboy in American literature, spawning the entire genre of Western fiction,
films, and theater that followed. Remington provided the concept of the project,
its factual content, and its illustrations and Wister supplied the stories,
sometimes altering Remington’s ideas.[44] (Remington’s prototype cowboys were
Mexican rancheros but Wister made the American cowboys descendants of Saxons—in
truth, they were both partially right, as the first American cowboys were both
the ranchers who tended the cattle and horses of the American Revolutionary army
on Long Island and the Mexicans who ranched in the Arizona and California
territories).[45]
Remington was one of the first American artists to illustrate the true gait of
the horse in motion (along with Thomas Eakins), as validated by the famous
sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge.[46] Previously, horses in full
gallop were usually depicted with all four legs pointing out, like “hobby
horses”. The galloping horse became Remington’s signature subject, copied and
interpreted by many Western artists who followed him, adopting the correct
anatomical motion. Though criticized by some for his use of photography,
Remington often created depictions that slightly exaggerated natural motion to
satisfy the eye. He wrote, “the artist must know more than the camera... (the
horse must be) incorrectly drawn from the photographic standpoint (to achieve
the desired effect).”[47]
Also, noteworthy was Remington’s invention of “cowboy” sculpture. From his
inaugural piece, The Bronco Buster (1895), he created an art form which is still
very popular among collectors of Western art.
An early advocate of the photoengraving process over wood engraving for magazine
reproduction of illustrative art, Remington became an accepted expert in
reproduction methods, which helped gain him strong working relationships with
editors and printers.[48] Furthermore, Remington’s skill as a businessman was
equal to his artistry, unlike many other artists who relied on their spouses or
business agents or no one at all to run their financial affairs. He was an
effective publicist and promoter of his art. He insisted that his originals be
handled carefully and returned to him in pristine condition (without editor’s
marks) so he could sell them. He carefully regulated his output to maximize his
income and kept detailed notes about his works and his sales.
In 1991 the PBS series American Masters filmed a documentary of Remington's life
called Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days produced and directed by Tom
Neff.
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