Frederic Remington

American, 1861-1909

BiographyFrederic Remington, one of the most important and influential artists to portray the American West, was largely self-taught. He was born on October 4, 1861, in Canton, New York. After stints in two military schools, Remington enrolled in the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1878. 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. After his father's death, Remington lived off his inheritance and modest work income, and refused to go back to art school. In 1883, Remington went to rural 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 of him as lazy. Remington continued sketching but at this point his results were still cartoonish and amateur. 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 him and returned to Ogdensburg. 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. With financial backing from his Uncle Bill, Remington was able to pursue his art career and support his wife.

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. After returning East. He expanded his commission work His first year as a commercial artist had been financially successful. 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. 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. His full-color oil painting Return of the Blackfoot War Party was exhibited at the National Academy of Design. 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. 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. In 1890, Remington and his wife moved to New Rochelle, New York in order to have both more living space and extensive studio facilities with space to live a rural life. Moreover, an artists' colony had developed in the town.

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. Remington got exclusive access to the soldiers and their stories and boosted his reputation with the reading public as "The Soldier Artist". Through the 1890s, 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. Remington's had developed a sculptor's 360-degree sense of vision but 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. With help from friend and sculptor Frederick Ruckstull, Remington constructed his first armature and clay model, a "broncho 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's association with President 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. In 1888, he achieved the public honor of having two paintings used for reproduction on U. S. Postal stamps. 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 then returned to sculpture, and produced his first works produced by the lost wax method. In 1905, Remington had a major publicity coup when Collier's devoted an entire issue to the artist, showcasing his latest works. It was that same year that the president of the Fairmount Park Art Association (now the Association for Public Art) commissioned Remington to create a large sculpture of a cowboy for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, which was erected in 1908 on a jutting rock along Kelly Drive. Philadelphia's Cowboy (1908) was Remington's first and only large-scale bronze.

The financial panic of 1907 caused a slow down in his sales. 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. 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.

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