Frederic Remington

Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in the genre of Western American Art. His works are known for depicting the Western United States in the last quarter of the 19th century and featuring such images as cowboys, American Indians, and the US Cavalry.^[1]

Quick Facts Born, Died ...

Frederic Remington
Born	Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-10-04)October 4, 1861 Canton, New York, U.S.
Died	December 26, 1909(1909-12-26) (aged 48) Ridgefield, Connecticut, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, one drawing class, 1878; Art Students League, New York, 1886
Known for	Painting (watercolor and oil), sculpture, drawing (pen and ink, ink wash), mixed media, journalist and writer
Movement	Illustration, Impressionism, Nocturne, and Tonalism
Spouse	Eva Caten (1884–1909)
Relatives	Eliphalet Remington (cousin)
Awards	1891: Elected Associate of the National Academy of Design (ANA)
Patron(s)	Theodore Roosevelt, Elizabeth Custer, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly, Century Magazine, Scribner's, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, and many others

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Remington was born in Canton, New York, in 1861 to Seth Pierrepont Remington (1830–1880)^[2] and Clarissa (Clara) Bascom Sackrider (1836–1912).^[3][4]

His maternal family owned hardware stores and emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine in the early 18th century.^[5] His maternal family, of French Basque ancestry, came to America in the early 1600s and founded Windsor, Connecticut.^[6][7] Remington's father was a Union army colonel in the American Civil War, whose family had arrived in America from England in 1637. He was a newspaper editor and postmaster, and the staunchly Republican family was active in local politics. The Remingtons were horsemen. One of Remington's great-grandfathers, Samuel Bascom, was a saddle maker by trade. Remington's ancestors also fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.^[8]

Remington was a cousin of Eliphalet Remington, founder of the Remington Arms Company, which is considered America's oldest gunmaker.^[9] He was also related to three famous mountain men: Jedediah Smith, Jonathan T. Warner, and Robert "Doc" Newell.^{[citation needed]} Through the Warner side of his family, Remington was related to George Washington, the first US president.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[10] 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.^[11] He enjoyed making caricatures and silhouettes of his classmates. At 17, he wrote to his uncle^{[clarification needed]} 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."^[12] He imagined a career for himself as a journalist, with art as a sideline.

Remington attended the art school at Yale University and studied under John Henry Niemeyer.^[1] Remington was the only male student in his first year. 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.^[13] 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 50, receiving respectful recognition from the citizens of Ogdensburg. Remington's Uncle Mart^{[clarification needed]} 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's newspaper and 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 19, he made his first trip west, going to Montana,^[14] at first to buy a cattle operation and then a mining interest, but realized that he did not have sufficient capital for either. In the American West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the quickly shrinking bison herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major confrontations of US Cavalry and Native American tribes, scenes he had imagined since his childhood. He also hunted grizzly bears with Montague Stevens in New Mexico in 1895.^[15] 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 much of the mythic West had already slipped into history. From that first trip, Harper's Weekly printed Remington's first published commercial effort, a re-drawing of a quick sketch on wrapping paper that he had mailed back east.^[16] In 1883, Remington went to rural Kansas,^[17][18] south of the city of Peabody near the tiny community of Plum Grove,^[19] 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 found ranching to be a rough, boring, isolated occupation which deprived him of the finer things he was used to from East Coast life, and the real ranchers thought of him as lazy. In 1884, he sold his land.^[20]

Remington continued sketching, but at this point his results were still cartoonish and amateur. After less than a year, after he sold his ranch, he 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. (He had previously asked her father for her hand, but had been turned down -- her father was a widower at the time and felt he needed Eva, but after he had remarried, was more amenable.)^[21] The young couple returned to Kansas City immediately. Eva 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 him and returned to Ogdensburg.^[22] 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.^[23] 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,^{[clarification needed]} Remington was able to pursue his art career and support his wife.

Several of his relatives were also artists, including Indian portrait artist George Catlin,^[24] cowboy sculptor Earl W. Bascom,^[24] and (also on the Bascom side) Frank Tenney Johnson, the "father of western moonlight painting".^{[citation needed]}

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.^[25]

After returning East, Remington was sent by Harper's Weekly to cover the 1886 Charleston earthquake. 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.^[26] 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'." ^[27]

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 Blackfoot, the Crow Nation, and the Canadian Mounties, which were 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.^[28] The 29-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".^[29] 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.^[28] 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 were by then considered passé.

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.^[30]

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 his "Wild West" reputation were strong social attractions. His biography falsely promoted some of the myths he encouraged about his Western experiences.^[31]

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" (this estimation failed to account for his female Native American subjects).^[32]

In 1890, Remington and his wife moved to New Rochelle, New York, to have both more living space and extensive studio facilities, and also with the hope of gaining more exercise. The community was close to New York City affording easy access to the publishing houses and galleries necessary for the artist, and also rural enough to provide him with the space he needed for horseback riding, and other physical activities that relieved the long hours of concentration required by his work. Moreover, an artists' colony had developed in the town, so that the Remingtons counted among their neighbors writers, actors, and artists such as Francis Wilson, Julian Hawthorne, Edward Kemble, and Augustus Thomas.

The Remingtons' substantial Gothic revival house was situated at 301 Webster Avenue, on a prestigious promontory known as Lathers Hill. A sweeping lawn rolled south toward Long Island Sound, providing views on three sides of the beautiful Westchester County countryside. Remington called it Endion, an Ojibwa word meaning "the place where I live".^[33] In the early years, no real studio existed at Endion and Remington did most of his work in a large attic under the home's front gable where he stored materials collected on his many western excursions. Later he used his library on the main floor, a larger, more comfortable room that soon took on the cluttered appearance of an atelier. However, neither situation was completely satisfactory: the space was limited, the light was less than adequate, and the surroundings were generally uninspiring. In the spring of 1896 Remington retained the New Rochelle architect O. William Degen to plan a studio addition to the house. An article in the New Rochelle Pioneer of April 26 touted the "fine architectural design" of the studio. Remington himself wrote to his friend the novelist Owen Wister:^[34]

Have concluded to build a butler's pantry and a studio (Czar size) on my house—we will be torn [up] for a month and then will ask you to come over—throw your eye on the march of improvement and say this is a great thing for American art. The fireplace is going to be like this.—Old Norman house—Big—big.

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".^[66] 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, portraying men almost exclusively,^[46] and the landscape was usually of secondary importance, unlike the members and descendants of the contemporary Hudson River School, such as Frederic Edwin 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, also 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.^[67] Remington provided the concept of the project, its factual content, and its illustrations and Wister supplied the stories, sometimes altering Remington's ideas.^[68] (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.)^[69]

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.^[70] 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, which was copied and interpreted by many Western artists who followed him to adopt 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 that "the artist must know more than the camera... (the horse must be) incorrectly drawn from the photographic standpoint (to achieve the desired effect)."^[71]

Also, noteworthy was Remington's invention of "cowboy" sculpture. From his inaugural piece, The Broncho Buster (1895), he created an art form which is still very popular among collectors of Western art. He has been called the "Father of Cowboy Sculpture".^[72]

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.^[73] 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 for his originals to be handled carefully and returned to him in pristine condition (without editor's marks) so that 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, Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days, which was produced and directed by Tom Neff.

Remington was portrayed by Nick Chinlund in the TNT miniseries Rough Riders (1997), which depicts the Spanish–American War and shows Remington's time as a war correspondent and his partnership with William Randolph Hearst (portrayed by George Hamilton).

• Selected works
• 
  A Dash for the Timber, 1889, depicts cowboys in the Southwest shooting at Apaches in the rear. One of the eight riders is already wounded but remains on his horse.
• 
  The Gendarme (1889)
• 
  The Advance-Guard, or The Military Sacrifice (1890)
• 
  The Hussar (1893)
• 
  The Hunters' Supper
• 
  The Herd Boy
• 
  The Outlier
• 
  Coronado Sets Out to the North
• 
  The Parley
• 
  Fight for the Waterhole
• 
  Indians Simulating Buffalo
• 
  The Scout: Friends or Foes?, 1902–1905, oil on canvas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
• 
  A Cold Morning on the Range, c. 1904, Oil on canvas, American Museum of Western Art, Denver, Colorado
• 
  Ridden Down (1905–1906) depicts an Indian in defeat with his horse exhausted, stoically calling the spirits while awaiting his fate
• 
  Episode of the Buffalo Gun
• 
  Mounted Indian Scout
• 
  Uhlan
• 
  Scouts Climbing a Mountain
• 
  A Map in the Sand
• 
  The Call for Help
• 
  Buffalo Runners-Big Horn Basin, 1909, Oil on canvas, Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (https://www.sidrichardsonmuseum.org Archived May 12, 2021, at the Wayback Machine)
• 
  The Love Call, 1909, Oil on canvas, Sid Richardson Museum
• 
  The Luckless Hunter, 1909, Oil on canvas, Sid Richardson Museum
• 
  The Sentinel, 1889, Oil on canvas, Sid Richardson Museum
• 
  Cowboy, 1908, in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

American museums with significant collections of his paintings, illustrations, and sculptures include:

• Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, New York;
• Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
• Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
• Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming
• Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma
• Metropolitan Museum, New York City
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and others

• Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York
• Frederic Remington High School in Brainerd, Kansas
• Frederic Remington House in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a National Historic Landmark
• Frederic Remington Post Office Building in Ogdensburg, New York
• Liberty Ship named Frederic Remington and used in World War II^[74]
• New Rochelle Walk of Fame, inductee
• Texas Trail of Fame, inductee
• Stockmen's Memorial, 1980^[75]
• R. W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana, museum has paintings and sculptures by Remington
• Remington Arts Festival, Canton, New York, held the first weekend in October
• Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, inductee 1978^[76]
• Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum inductee 1978^[77]
• Mentioned in poem "Legacy of a Rodeo Man" composed and performed by cowboy poet Baxter Black^[78]
• Mentioned in the lyrics of "The Last Cowboy Song" by The Highwaymen. 'Remington showed us how he looked on canvas, and Louis L'Amour has told us his tale'

• Cold Morning on the Range, a Remington painting
• Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days, 1991 American Masters documentary
• Earl W. Bascom, cowboy sculptor and cousin to Remington
• J. K. Ralston, western artist
• Charles M. Russell, western artist