During the course of his lifetime from the Civil War to beyond the turn of the century, western
artist Frederic Remington produced over 3000 drawings, illustrations, paintings and bronzes
capturing life on the open range in a uniquely romantic period in American history when
cowboys herded cattle, Indian tribes hunted buffalo, and the U.S. cavalry battled Indians for
territorial dominance.
Born in upstate New York and only two months old when his father left for the Civil
War, Remington developed a passion for the adventure he imagined in the far West at an early
age, sketching the horses and people he imagined. Without formal art training until enrolled at
Yale as an art student in 1878, Remington quickly tired of academic training but often
contributed to the Yale Courant, the first illustrated college weekly. After meeting Eva Adele
Caten, Remington set off for the far West with a small inheritance on the first of several
sojourns and trials at ranching, prospecting, and business to earn his fortune, returning to
earn her hand in marriage. However unstable their finances during the early years, his
fortunes lay in his commitment to documenting the West.
Over the years he traveled the Dakotas, Kansas, Wyoming, Arizona, the Oregon and
Santa Fe Trails and Indian territories. With his first drawing published in Harper's Weekly in
1882, Remington won national acclaim with Harper's cover art, "The Apache War - Indian
Scouts on Geronimo's Trail" in 1886. In 1888 he won two prizes for painting from the National
Academy of Design, supplied Harper's with 54 illustrations, 32 in Outing and 64 in Century
magazines, and garnered the recognition of Theodore Roosevelt who became a life-long friend
and champion of his work.
Although distinguished as an illustrator, Remington longed for recognition as a painter
and finally made that break at the turn of the century with a commissioned series of paintings
from Colliers. Success was assured with several exhibitions of his action paintings and
detailed bronzes capturing the heart of the West, culminating in an exhibition at New York's
Knoedler Gallery in December 1909, embraced by the public and critics alike. The artist's
death occurred at the height of his career just after Christmas, leaving as his legacy a body of
work reviewed as "epic in its imaginative quality, historically important in its prominent
contribution to the romantic epoch in the making of the West."
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