Frederic Remington

(American, 1861–1909)

Frederic Remington was an American artist best known for his paintings and bronze sculptures of cowboys, US Cavalry, and Native Americans in the American West. Merging his experiences with memories, they represent Remington’s sadness that the frontier he had known as a young man had nearly vanished. “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever,” he once reflected. “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.” Born on October 4, 1861 in Canton, NY, Remington’s family was deeply entrenched in American culture, with his father a Colonel in the Civil War and the famed painter of Native American tribes, George Catlin, a relative by blood. Studying art at Yale University in the 1870s, Remington was instilled with a lifelong passion for the arts. In 1881, Remington made his first camping trip to Montana, where he fell in love with the vast spaces and lifestyle of the cowboys. The artist was soon selling illustrations to periodicals like Collier's and Harper's Weekly, propelling himself to recognition in cities back East. Remington died on December 26, 1909 in Ridgefield, CT. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, NY, among others.