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<TITLE>Frederic S. Remington Biography</TITLE>
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<CENTER><IMG SRC="images/remington_sig.jpg" WIDTH="219" HEIGHT="55" VALIGN="0" HALIGN="0" BORDER="0"><BR>
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<B>Remington illustrated his own story about bird hunting,<BR>
"The Blue Quail of the Cactus", published in <i>Harper's Monthly</i>,<BR>
October 1896, watercolor en grisaille & graphite, 13.75 x 29.5"</B><BR><BR></CENTER>
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<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Few artists of the American
West could equal the breadth of experience of <b>FREDERIC SACKRIDER REMINGTON
(1861-1909)</b>. From the Santa Fe Trail to the Oregon Trail, he came
to possess firsthand knowledge as a rancher, a military scout, a hunter
and trapper, and as a reporter. Few of his contemporaries were equally
devoted to capturing that particular historical moment, the three brief
decades that saw the taming of the expansive and dangerous western frontier.
Looking back at his career in 1905, Remington wrote: "I knew the wild
riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever...and the more
I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing
how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked
the more the panorama unfolded."<BR>
<BR>
As did his talent. His evolving clarity of purpose and the naturally vivid
subject matter inspired Remington to compulsively record the details,
producing thousands of illustrations in the course of his twenty-three
year career. Their accuracy, immediacy and drama, anchored by his equestrian
expertise, fused his functions as artist and historian.<BR>
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Following his graduation from Yale's new art school in 1880, Remington
roamed the country west of the Mississippi for five years. His drawings
began appearing regularly in <i>Harper's</i> in 1886, answering the popular
need to know about Indian wars, wagon trains and cattle drives. He would
return to the West for three months annually for many years, aware of
his mission and of the source of his success: the crucial marriage of
his "hard as nails" style with his subject matter. One critic said that
his uncompromising depiction of the "stark reality" of Western life "gives
him both his style and his interpretation". Another said that "under a
burning sun, he has worked out an impressionism of his own". And the painter
Childe Hassam wrote enthusiastically to the artist: "You are sure to have
lots of success...Nobody else can do (these pictures)." He turned his
studios into veritable museums of Western artifacts. Theodore Roosevelt
offered this blunt praise in 1907: "He has portrayed a most characteristic
and yet vanishing type of American life." His dedication to representing
the facts of the Western experience was at the core of his endeavors,
to which this country owes its most complete, faithful and compelling
portrayal of its frontier heritage, from the most vivid, savage conflict
to the lost, vast stillness of real wilderness. - J.P.</font><BR>
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