Frederic Remington

1861-1909

Frederic Remington captured the American West at its hinge moment. Born in Canton, New York in 1861, he came to painting through a roundabout path—early art lessons at military school, a brief stint at Yale, failed ventures in ranching and business—before finding his true subject in 1881 when he first traveled west to Montana. He arrived to witness the last major confrontations between the US Cavalry and Native American tribes, the shrinking bison herds, and the unfenced prairies that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Beginning with illustrations for Harper's Weekly in 1886, he became America's most famous chronicler of cowboys, cavalry, and frontier life, working in oil, watercolor, and sculpture. A commission to illustrate Theodore Roosevelt's Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail cemented his reputation. By 1889, when he won a medal at the Paris Exposition, Remington had become the era's defining voice of the vanishing West, his vivid, action-filled compositions setting him apart from landscape painters of earlier generations. He died in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1909.