By Carolyn Lebo
What pictures do you like best? How about pictures of the Wild West? Pictures of the Indians with their horses and dogs and rolled-up tents on the trail to a new hunting ground? Pictures of cowboys riding their herd, roping broncos, and waving a six-shooter? Pictures of United States soldiers protecting and guarding property in Indian country?
Are these the kinds of pictures you like? Wow! Me too!
Fortunately, there was an American artist who painted such pictures very well. His name was Frederic Remington. He was born in Canton, New York, on October 1, 1861, the only child of a newspaper publisher. His parents encouraged him to go to Yale University, where he enrolled in art class. He was one of two students in Yale’s new School of Arts. The other student was a young man named Poultney Bigelow. Together, Bigelow and Remington worked on the Courant, the Yale newspaper. They published it weekly, with Remington drawing all the cartoons.
Remington was also very interested in sports and horses. At Yale, he was a varsity football player, a heavyweight boxer, and an excellent horseman. He had shown his interest in art at an early age by filling sketchbooks with studies of horses. After he left Yale and his father died, he headed west to make his fortune. He traveled by train to the Montana territory and immediately felt at ease with all the people who populated the West.
And he began to draw and draw and draw! He didn’t believe in sitting at home in an art studio. He went out into the Wild West and would draw (and later paint) the people as he saw them going about their daily lives. He lived with the prospectors, Indians, scouts, and settlers and recorded all the activities he found in each group in his sketches.
His first real job as an artist was as an illustrator. An illustrator’s job was to draw pictures in black and white for magazines and books. He was much like a human camera! He would put down sketches in pen and ink about life in the West, so people in the East would know what life was like “out there.”
His recognition as an artist began when he sent a sketch of some Indians on horseback to New York on a piece of wrapping paper and it was printed, with modifications, in the most prestigious magazine of the day, Harper’s Weekly. He tried sheep ranching but lost his money. Then he returned East to marry his sweetheart, and they moved back to Kansas City. They tried setting up an art center, but it soon failed. He sent his wife back home and returned again to the West, where he began to paint with a passion.
Remington painted many scenes of patriots standing the ground around a fort, cowboys herding their cattle, and Indians engaged in a full buffalo run. These were exciting happenings. But he also loved to paint his Indians as plain, everyday people and not have them all dressed up in full costume of feathers and war paint. He shows us real Indians, relaxing and working, clean and dirty, out hunting and at home by the campfire. His soldiers were not always dressed up for a parade or inspection, but they look like real men, cooking their suppers over the wood-burning fire, cleaning their horses and guarding the wagons. And his cowboys were rodeo-romping real cowboys! Remington called them “men with the bark on,” the rough and tough men of the West.
And Remington’s horses were real horses too! How he loved to paint horses! His horses are not “picture book” horses. Each one is special, different from every other horse. They are painted to look dull or bright, mean or gentle, lazy or full of life, just like real horses.
In 1885 he returned to New York City. He began to try to sell his pictures to editors there, but most were not interested. His Yale friend Poultney Bigelow had started a new magazine, Outing, and Remington went to work for him. Soon other magazines wanted Remington’s pictures. He sold 54 pictures to Harper’s Weekly in 1888 and he began exhibiting his art at the National Academy. Soon he was illustrating and writing his own books about life in the Wild West. Two of the most popular were Pony Tracks (1895) and The Way of an Indian (1906).
In 1898, when the Spanish American War began, Remington went to Cuba as a war correspondent. He was deeply shaken by the reality of combat. His return to the US was followed by a period of great creativity, especially his experimentation with nocturnal images. These night pictures of darkness were filled with danger, threatened violence, and silence. They seem to mirror Remington’s experience of war. He completed 70 “nocturnals” that were deeply personal paintings to him. They also revealed his interest in the new technology of the day, such as flash photography and the advent of electricity!
President Theodore Roosevelt remembered him and chose Remington to illustrate a book he had written about the West. Remington’s fame as an illustrator began and grew. He illustrated many books by the most authoritative writers on the West, like Francis Parkman.
In 1895, Remington turned to sculpturing. He seemed to have a natural talent as he produced 22 bronzes with the same sense of drama that his paintings contain. He made statues of men on horseback that seem full of life and action. You can almost feel the pain of the galloping horse and sense the stern focus of the cowboy as he ropes a steer. Remington’s ability to show the true expressions of “his people” and “his horses” was amazing. His most famous sculpture, called “The Bronco Buster,” shows the action-filled style he used in all his sculptures of the Old West.
Remington’s sculptures and paintings can be seen in almost every major art museum in America, and many reproductions of his work are seen around the world. In his short lifetime, Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings and paintings, 22 bronze sculptures, a novel, a Broadway play and over 100 articles and stories. All these were done at the closing of the American frontier and in the first decade of the twentieth century.
He died on December 26, 1909, at the age of 48. He had lived his life hard as an outstanding illustrator, writer, painter, and sculptor, an American artist who painted and sculpted American people.
If you want to see life in the Wild West, get a book illustrated by Frederic Remington or go online to see his many outstanding works. You will be in for a real treat!
Carolyn Lebo has received distinguished teacher awards from the National Chamber of Commerce, the Amgen Foundation, and was the recipient of the prestigious Bravo Award from the Los Angeles Music Center honoring the top ten art teachers in Southern California. She and her husband Stephen, a photographer and filmmaker, developed the Art Masterpiece Video Series and are dedicated to presenting the Masters and teaching related art lessons to young people through their homeschool-friendly company, Art Video Productions.
Did you enjoy this article? You'll find each issue of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine packed with great articles to inform you, encourage you, and remind you that you're not alone. Plus, you can receive 19 free gifts when you subscribe. Subscribe today!
www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com |
|
|
|
|
