“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.”
—Theodore Roosevelt on Frederic Remington

Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was born in far upstate New York to an old American family. A relative of George Washington, a cousin to the founder of Remington Arms, and the son of a Union Army Colonel, young Frederic was expected to carry the Remington name on in American politics and industry.

Things did not go according to plan. Remington was irritated by the beat of the drum at his military school, instead preferring to march to his own. When he could be persuaded to work indoors, he scored high marks in drawing, and so he pursued the inauspicious calling of a commercial artist down the Hudson—breezing past West Point and the ambitions of his parents—and into Connecticut, where he spent one semester studying art at Yale before restlessness took him back home. His father died shortly thereafter, leaving behind no sizable estate. Armed with his talent for drawing and a thirst for adventure, and having the tailwind which comes by a lack of vocational prospects, 19-year-old Frederic went the way of many an intrepid young American in the year 1880 and lit out for the territories.

The wild American West was in the process of being subdued when Remington arrived on the scene, but he was still early enough to behold many of the wonders this region was famous for. He chronicled the history of America’s western frontier by sketch, painting, and sculpture from the witness of his own eyes and the accounts of fellow pioneers. Vast plains, by then dissected by railroads and cattle drives, were still roamed by bands of bison which had once covered them like a flood. Mustangs, previously running feral by their millions as the bison, were then domesticated under the seat of the Indians and the U.S. Army soldiers who fought them. Outlaws still dueled at high noon, and Marshalls still chased them into the wilderness.

No one captured the romance of the West more compellingly than Remington. His work has informed the visions of artists, filmmakers, country dancehall proprietors, and any would-be cowboy from the 20th century and into the present day. The UATX student who is inspired to capture the excitement of a new and distinctly American frontier will find a kindred spirit in Frederic Remington.