Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American artist and author. The main subject of his paintings and sculptures was the American Old West with the characters typical for this period of time like cowboys, American Indians, the United States Cavalry and other Western personages.
Background
Ethnicity:
The family of Frederic Sackrider Remington’s father came to the United States from England in 1637. The ancestors of the artist’s mother were of French Basque origin and relocated to America at the beginning of the 1600s.
Frederic Sackrider Remington was born on October 4, 1861, in Canton, New York, United States. He was the only child of Clarissa Bascom Sackrider and Seth Pierre Remington, a journalist who served as a Union cavalry officer during the American Civil War. The family took an active part at the local political life and supported Republicans.
The first four years of his life Frederic lived in the absence of his father who was at war. Although, the boy had enough attention and care as the only child in the family. He was a vigorous and strong child whose favourite activities were hunting, swimming, riding and camping. Drawing cowboys was also on the list.
When Frederic was eleven-year-old, the family relocated to Ogdensburg, New York.
Among Frederic Remington’s distant relatives were such famous personalities as the Indian portraitist George Catlin, a cowboy sculptor Earl W. Bascom and the painter Frank Tenney Johnson. Remington’s cousin Eliphalet Remington founded the Remington Arms Company. The artist had also some kin relations with General George Washington, the first President of the United States of America.
Education
Young Frederic Remington was educated at Vermont Episcopal Institute in Burlington where he had the first drawing lessons. In autumn 1875, he began to attend the Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. Although Frederic had expressed some interest in pursuing a journalistic career, he entered Yale University as a student in the School of Fine Arts in 1878. He was the only man on the course. One of Remington’s teachers was John Henry Niemeyer.
While he was determined to pursue a career as an illustrator, he trained under the constraints of the formal art training and particularly resisted the academic practice of drawing from plaster casts rather than from nature. The first illustration he published in the student newspaper ‘Yale Courant’ depicted a football player.
At Yale, in addition to his studies, Remington participated in boxing and football as a member of the 1879 team, then captained by Walter Camp, later known as the "father of football."
Remington was obliged to left the institution in 1879 in order to take care of his ill father.
In 1886, the artist enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. He spent three months on painting and sketching course.
Frederic Remington combined his studies with the trips around the west of Mississippi River in order to develop his artistic skills by depicting and photographing the inhabitants of the plains, including cowboys, soldiers and horses. Later, these sketches served him as a material for his paintings and illustrations.
In 1900, Remington received an honorary degree from his former alma mater the Yale University.
Frederic Remington started his professional career from a post of a clerk at the state agencies in Albany, New York.
Being fascinated with the frontier, he made his first extended trip into the West - specifically to the Montana Territory - in 1881 and on his return, he sold his first sketches to Harper's Weekly magazine.
With a $9, 000 inheritance from his father, the 21-year-old Remington travelled West again, determined to seek his fortune. He bought a sheep farm in Kansas in 1883, but this venture proved a failure, and Remington sold it in the spring of 1884. He next embarked on a sketching trip to the Southwest, returning to Kansas City to invest in a saloon. However, this investment proved an unfortunate one. The artist set out on another tour of the Southwest, sketching subjects in Arizona and in the Indian Territory.
Due to the growth of the periodicals’ interest to the disappearing West Remington’s authentic sketches on the topic which he submitted to the newspapers provided him with the popularity among the publishers. On January 9, 1886, Harper's Weekly published his full-page cover. With the financial support from his Uncle Bill, Frederic Remington settled in New York City to pursue a career as a magazine illustrator.
The following summer the artist returned to the West, but on this occasion, his trip was financed by Harper's, which commissioned a series of illustrations covering the Indian Wars. These works, depicting clashes between United States troops commanded by General Nelson Miles and their Native American opponents, were published weekly in the magazine and proved highly popular with readers.
This business trip was followed by the next one, this time to cover the Charleston earthquake of 1886. To have more commissions, Remington began to collaborate with Outing magazine.
As a magazine illustrator, Remington's reputation grew quickly. Among his chief subjects were cowboys, cavalry soldiers, Native Americans and settlers, whom he depicted in realistic war scenes as well as engaged in the ordinary activities of camp life.
The pictures produced with ink he gave to magazines while the watercolours he tried to sell during the art exhibitions. His coloured canvases had the same Western subjects as the black-and-white artworks.
The next year, Remington was commissioned illustrations for a book titled ‘Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail’ by Theodore Roosevelt. It was a big boost for the artist’s career and provided him with a lifelong friendship.
In 1888 Century magazine commissioned a series of sketches and articles focusing on the adjustment of Native Americans to reservation life. Beginning with these reports, Remington became a regular and well-recognized writer on Western subjects both in journalism and in fiction. He subsequently served as a journal correspondent during the Indian Wars of 1890-91, in Russia and Algiers in 1892 and 1893, and in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
The first personal exhibition of the artist organized in 1890 at the American Art Galleries obtained good reviews from art critics. The same year, the artist relocated with his wife to New Rochelle, New York where he established the studio.
Frederic Remington became popular among the Western Army officers, including General Nelson Miles who often invited the artist to portray them in order to have national publicity on the Harper's Weekly pages. So, Remington’s status changed from the simple chronicler-artist of the Old West to the most historian-artist.
By the middle of 1890, with the help of his friend Frederick Ruckstull, the artist tried his hand in sculpture and produced his first sculptural compositions in bronze. One of the first ones was the well-known ‘Bronco Buster’ of 1895 which obtained good reviews of the public and was followed by more 24 sculptures the subsequent years, including the compositions made from wax.
At the beginning of the new century, the contract with Harper's magazine ended. To earn the living, Remington wrote and illustrated one of his first novels based on his West experiences called ‘The Way of an Indian’ which however was published only five years later in Cosmopolitan. The next story by the artist, ‘John Ermine of the Yellowstone’, appeared in 1902 but had no big success as well mostly because of the best seller ‘The Virginian’ by Owen Wister issued the same time.
The following year, Frederic Remington signed a contract with Collier’s weekly magazine according to which he had to make a painting for the periodical issues each month.
A huge sculpture of a cowboy commissioned by the president of the Fairmount Park Art Association (currently the Association for Public Art) for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park in 1905 was finished in 1908 and became one of the exemplars of site-specific American art.
Since that time, Frederic Remington’s art began slowly give place to the artists more imaginative in style, like Maxfield Parrish. Remington tried to adopt impressionistic techniques, but never fully assumed it.
Despite the above-mentioned authors, Frederic Remington illustrated the books of such writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Owen Wister, and Francis Parkman.
Achievements
Frederic Remington was a distinguished illustrator and sculptor of the late 19th and the beginning of the 20th century whose historically precise artworks on American West were widely recognized during his lifetime and continued to be regarded as such nowadays.
The artist’s naturalistic and sometimes ethnographic style of painting and sculpting had a great impact on his contemporaries who created the illustration of Old West, including Charles Russell and Charles Schreyvogel. Along with another realist painter, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington was the pioneer in the anatomically true depiction of the gait of the horse in full gallop.
Remington’s collaboration with the American writer Owen Wister pushed the development of the western fiction industry.
The documentary of Remington’s life and work produced by Tom Neff was issued by the PBS series in 1991. The actor Nick Chinlund interpreted the artist in the TNT miniseries of 1997 called ‘Rough Riders’.
Frederic Remington’s heritage is nowadays included in the collections of such well-known museums and galleries as Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the Amon Carter Museum, the Sid Richardson Museum, both in Fort Worth, Texas, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming, the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma and others.
In 2017, one of the artist’s canvases called 'Coming Through the Rye' was purchased at Christie's in New York City for $11,223,500.
Pretty Mother of the Night – White Otter is No Longer a Boy
The Scream of Shrapnel at San Juan Hill
Shotgun Hospitality
Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill
A Misdeal
Apache Fire Signal
A Gander Pull
An Assault on His Dignity
sculpture
The Broncho Buster
Views
As many of his contemporaries, Frederic Remington treated Native Americans as mysterious, courageous, cruel and illiterate persons who were prone to superstitions. In contradiction, White men on his illustrations were shown as courageous and noble.
Quotations:
"Art is a she-devil of a mistress, and if at times in earlier days she would not even stoop to my way of thinking, I have persevered and will so continue."
"Big art is a process of elimination… Cut down and out-do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about-to imagine… What you want to do is just create the thought-materialize the spirit of a thing."
"The artist must know more than the camera ... (the horse must be) incorrectly drawn from the photographic standpoint (to achieve the desired effect)."
"I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever. And the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded."
Membership
Associate Member
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1891
Personality
Talented in painting, Frederic Remington had the traits of a gifted marketer. He actively promoted his art both among the publishers and art galleries. The artist was very exigent to the safety of his artworks and insisted that the editors didn’t leave their marks on them in order to sell the canvases.
Remington kept complete records on all his sales.
As to his interests, the artist liked such outdoor activities as skiing, hiking on nature, fishing and hunting.
Quotes from others about the person
"The name of Frederic Remington has become synonymous with the realistic portrayal of our Old West. His impressive paintings, drawings and works of sculpture of the early day frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians are today well established as pictorial documentations of the most colourful and virile, as well as the most popular chapter in American history." Harold McCracken, American author
Interests
football, boxing
Connections
Frederic Remington met his future wife Eva Adele Caten from Gloversville, New York, in the summer of 1879. Five years later, on October 1, they married.
Frederic Remington
The book traces the career of the nineteenth century American artist, discusses his portrayal of the American West, and depicts his development as a painter
