2024 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction74 / 120 • View Catalog •
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VERSO
Titled
Label, Texas Art Gallery, Dallas, Texas
A “Wind Jammer” is included in the Frederic Remington Catalogue Raisonné as number 2115.
Western art historian Brian W. Dippie wrote, “Frederic Sackrider Remington was born in the town of Canton in northern New York on October 4, 1861. His boyhood fostered a lifelong love of horses and the out-of-doors, while his father’s tales of actions as a cavalry officer in the Civil War filled his head with pictures and inspired a passion for things military that found a western focus with the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer’s command on the Little Bighorn River during the nation’s Centennial Year, 1876. At the age of fourteen Remington was smitten with the urge to go west and see for himself the blue-clad cavalrymen, bronze-skinned Indians, and buckskin-garbed frontier scouts who peopled his fantasies and filled his school texts and sketchbooks.
“Remington’s achievement was to fuse observation and imagination so seamlessly that his contemporaries assumed he had actually witnessed what he showed, and a journalist writing in 1892, at a time when Remington’s reputation as the supreme illustrator of Western life was recent but already secure, was acute in remarking: ‘In his pictures of life on the plains, and of Indian fighting, he has almost created a new field in illustration, so fresh and novel are his characterizations.… It is a fact that admits of no question that Eastern people have formed their conceptions of what the Far-Western life is like, more from what they have seen in Mr. Remington’s pictures than from any other source, and if they went to the West or to Mexico they would expect to see men and places looking exactly as Mr. Remington has drawn them.’
“Remington’s was a West without much softness or subtlety. It was, instead, a grand theater for the testing of manhood. It was a throwback to pioneering days, and the molding of the national character, and the setting for a great drama. The winning of the West was his theme, and he never outgrew it.”
As Theodore Roosevelt observed of Remington in Pearson’s Magazine in 1907, “He is, of course, one of the most typical American artists we have ever had, and he has portrayed a most characteristic and yet vanishing type of American life. The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time.”
Remington biographer Harold McCracken wrote, “Frederic Remington was just coming into professional success when the situation in the West was rising to its most dramatic stage. In 1888, two years after the first national publication of his work, Remington was commissioned by Century Magazine to return to his old adventuring haunts in the Southwest, to write and illustrate a series of articles on how the Army was progressing in getting the pioneer state of affairs under control. For this assignment he joined his old friends the U. S. Tenth Cavalry on their toughest mission against Geronimo and his scattered bands of Apache renegades.… And from that time on there was hardly a year that Remington did not spend some time in the West, personally following the progress of events until the final episode in the Indians Wars, which ended the historic period of the Old West.”
PROVENANCE
Jack Warner, Palm Springs, California
Thomas N. Buffaloe, La Jolla, California
Al Luckett, Boulder, Colorado
Texas Art Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1985
Red McCombs Collection, San Antonio, Texas
LITERATURE
Frederic Remington, Drawings, 1897, illustrated