According to Harold McCracken, “Frederic Remington was a nonconformist and adventurous in nearly everything he did. The first American sculptor to use the cire-perdue process, he became a close friend of Riccardo Bertelli, who brought the technique here from Italy and established the Roman Bronze Works. In a conversation with the present writer a good many years ago, Mr. Bertelli commented: ‘He [Remington] always wanted to have his horses with all four feet off the ground. I sometimes had quite a time with him.’

“The Cheyenne was the first of Remington’s bronzes originally cast by the Roman Bronze Works (copyrighted November 21, 1901) and it does have the Indian’s horse with all four feet off the ground.”

In The American West in Bronze, Carol Clark wrote, “[Cheyenne] presents a historical image of an highly visible defiant warrior on a pony, a sculpture that Remington described as ‘burning the air.’ His patrons admired the statuette’s tour de force modeling, the extraordinary casting in which a draped bison robe supports the flying horse, and the patination and chasing that animate the tactile surface. The animal moves as swiftly and as confidently as its rider, who tilts forward a the waist, gripping his mount with muscular buttocks, thighs, and calves. Mouth open in a cry that distorts his face, one hand holding a lance, the other clenching a quirt, with a shield on his back and knife at his waist, the man exudes power. But against whom does he ride into battle—enemies from another tribe or soldiers of the U.S. Army? Whoever the foe, by the time Remington’s sculpture was made in 1901, it presented a vision from the past.”

PROVENANCE
Ran Family Collection, Cincinnati, OH
Mongerson Wunderlich, Chicago, IL
Gallery of the Masters, St. Louis, MO
Collection of Sydney Melville Shoenberg, Jr., 1997
[Sotheby’s, New York, 2002]
Private Collection, Potomac, MD, 2002

LITERATURE
Harold McCracken, The Frederic Remington Book (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), page 260, example illustrated
Peter Hassrick, Frederic Remington (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1973), pages 192-3, example illustrated
Michael D. Greenbaum, Icons of the West, Frederic Remington’s Sculpture (Ogdensburg, NY: Frederic Remington Art Museum, 1996), pages 88-93, example illustrated

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