Frederick Remington

A rider clings to a wildly rearing horse. A cavalry unit gallops across the plains. Rough-and-ready cowboys ride full tilt through a frontier town. These scenes of action and adventure come alive in paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington, the best-known artist of the American West.

Remington was a tall, blond New Yorker who studied at Yale and at the New York Art Student League. He made his first trip to the West when he was 19. There, in the rigorous lives of the cowboys, Indians, and frontier soldiers, he found the subject matter for his life’s work. In drawings and paintings, he depicted cattle roundups, campfire scenes, frontier battles, buffalo hunts, and other scenes of western life. Remington was proud of his ablity to depict horses in action. He photographed horses in motion to get the details right. Many of his drawings and paintings were reproduced in magazines and books.

In the 1890s, he turned to sculpture and created magnificent works in bronze.

Remington served as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and he wrote several books. But it was his unique ability to capture the romance and adventure of the West in art that made him famous worldwide.