Frederic Remington (American, 1861–1909)

Born in Canton, New York, Frederic Remington developed an early fascination with horses, soldiers, and the American West. After briefly studying art at Yale, he made his first trip West in 1881 and later lived for a time in Kansas, experiences that gave him firsthand knowledge of the people, horses, landscape, and military life that would define his career. Returning East, he studied at the Art Students League of New York and became a highly successful illustrator for publications including Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s. His assignments repeatedly took him West, and his widely reproduced images of cowboys, cavalrymen, Native Americans, and frontier life helped shape the popular American image of the West.

By the 1890s, Remington had achieved national prominence as both an illustrator and painter, and in 1895 he expanded into sculpture with The Bronco Buster, one of the most recognizable works of American Western art. Later in life, he increasingly abandoned illustration to concentrate on painting and sculpture, developing a looser, more atmospheric style particularly evident in his dramatic nocturnes. In 1908, determined to distance himself from his commercial past, Remington burned dozens of paintings that had been created for magazine illustrations, declaring that “there is nothing left but my landscape studies.” He died unexpectedly the following year, at the age of forty-eight, following complications from an emergency appendectomy.