American painter, sculptor, illustrator, and author Frederic Sackrider Remington excelled in Western American art. American Indians, Cowboys, and the U.S. Cavalry are the subjects of his paintings portraying the Western United States in the final quarter of the 19th century.
He was born on October 4, 1861, and died on December 26, 1909. Remington studied art for two years (1878–1880) at Yale University and for a short time (1886) at the Art Students League of New York. After then, he mainly focused on creating illustrations. He traveled much during his years of education, spending a lot of time west of the Mississippi River. He constantly sketched and took photos while traveling, gathering stuff to bring back to his studio in New York City and use there.
This article will reveal some information about Frederic Remington’s early life and career. Then, we will delve into essential information about this excellent American painter. Read on to learn more about him.
Family Background
Seth Pierrepont Remington and Clarissa (Clara) Bascom Sackrider welcomed famous artist Frederic Remington into the world in Canton, New York, in 1861. His paternal ancestors came to America from Alsace-Lorraine in the early 18th century and ran hardware stores. His maternal family, who were of French Basque descent, settled in Windsor, Connecticut, in the early 1600s. In the American Civil War, Remington’s father served as a colonel in the Union army.
His ancestors had immigrated to America from England in 1637. He was a postmaster and a newspaper editor, and his adamantly Republican family was involved in neighborhood politics. The Remington family rode horses. Samuel Bascom, one of Remington’s great-grandfathers, worked as a saddle manufacturer. Additionally, Remington’s ancestors participated in the American Revolution, the French and Indian War, and the War of 1812.
Remington was a relative of Eliphalet Remington, who established the Remington Arms Company, which is regarded as the country’s first gun manufacturer. Additionally, he had ties to three well-known mountaineers: Jedediah Smith, Jonathan T. Warner, and Robert “Doc” Newell. Finally, Remington was connected to the first U.S. president, George Washington, through the Warner branch of his family.
Early Life: Growing Up
Remington was at war for most of his son’s first four years. After the war, he temporarily relocated his family to Bloomington, Illinois, where he accepted the editorship of the Bloomington Republican. Finally, however, the family returned to Canton in 1867. Remington was the couple’s only child, and he was showered with love and care. He was a boisterous kid who loved hunting, swimming, riding, and camping.
However, he had terrible academic performance, especially in arithmetic, which did not augur well for his father’s hopes that his son would go to West Point. Nevertheless, he drew and sketched images of cowboys and warriors from an early age.
When Remington was eleven years old, the family relocated to Ogdensburg, New York, where he enrolled in the church-run military school Vermont Episcopal Institute, where his father thought that the strict environment would help his son’s lack of focus and eventually lead to an army career. At the Institute, Remington received his first drawing instruction. The young Remington was then sent to a different military academy. His classmates described him as kind, a little thoughtless and lazy, good-natured, and of a charitable spirit, but not soldier material.
He took pleasure in creating silhouettes and caricatures of his peers. At age 17, he expressed his modest goals in a letter to his uncle “I have no desire to perform any significant labor. I only have one short life, so I don’t strive after fame or money to the extent that they would need tremendous effort on my part.” Instead, he envisioned a career as a journalist with art as a side business.
Art School at Yale
As the lone male freshman, Remington entered Yale University’s art school. He discovered that conventional art training, notably drawing from casts and still-life objects, was less appealing than football and boxing. His first artwork was a comic of a “bandaged football player” for the school publication Yale Courant. He enjoyed action drawing.
Even though he wasn’t a star, Remington and his family were quite proud of his participation on the successful Yale football team. He left Yale in 1879 to care for his tuberculosis-stricken father. At age 46, his father passed away a year later, and he was honored by the people of Ogdensburg.
Remington would visit his family on the weekends to see his lover Eva Caten after Remington’s Uncle Mart got his nephew a well-paying administrative job in Albany, New York. After her father turned down his engagement proposal to Eva, Remington started working as a reporter for his uncle Mart’s newspaper before moving on to other temporary positions.
Remington Begins His Travels
Remington chose not to return to art school and instead spent his time camping and having fun while surviving on his inheritance and meager earnings from his job. He traveled to Montana for the first time when he was 19, initially to purchase a cattle ranch and then a mining stake, but soon discovered he lacked the funds for either.
He witnessed the expansive plains, the rapidly dwindling buffalo herds, the still-unfenced cattle, and the final significant clashes between American Indian tribes and the U.S. Cavalry in the Old West of 1881, scenes he had fantasized since he was a young boy.
Even though the journey was taken for fun, Remington came away from it with a more accurate perception of the West than some of the other painters and writers who came after him, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey arrived after the Old West had vanished into history, which was 25 years later. Remington’s first commercial work, a redrawing of a fast sketch on wrapping paper that he had sent back East, was published by Harper’s Weekly right after that initial trip.
As one of the wealthy young Easterners known as “holiday stockmen,” Remington traveled to Peabody, Kansas, in 1883 to try his hand at the lucrative sheep ranching and wool business. Remington invested his money, but the ranchers regarded him as a lazy playboy and found ranching a challenging, monotonous, and isolating job that denied him the finer things in Eastern life.
Early Career
As an artist-correspondent on assignment from Harper’s Weekly, Remington was dispatched to Arizona in 1886 to report on the government’s conflict with Geronimo. Unfortunately, Remington never managed to catch up with Geronimo. Still, he collected many actual artifacts for later use as props and created a lot of photos and sketches that would later be useful for paintings. To complement the black-and-white photographs, he also included notes on the actual hues of the West, such as “shadows of horses should be a cool carmine & Blue.” Ironically, although his palette was based on actual observation, art experts later attacked it as “primitive and unnatural.”
Eighty-three illustrations for Theodore Roosevelt’s book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, which was to be serialized in The Century Magazine before publication, were commissioned to Remington in 1887. Roosevelt, then 29 years old, engaged in a Western adventure like Remington’s, losing money on a ranch in North Dakota the year before but collecting knowledge that helped him become an “expert” on the region. The job helped Remington’s career immensely and helped him form a bond with Roosevelt that would last a lifetime.
In 1890, he held his first one-person exhibition at the American Art Galleries, which included twenty-one works. With success virtually guaranteed, Remington established himself in society. His character, “pseudo-cowboy” speech pattern and “Wild West” reputation were powerful social draws. Unfortunately, some of the misconceptions he spread about his adventures in the West were erroneously supported by his biography.
Conclusion
Frederic Remington enjoyed a successful career as a painter and sculptor. Although he never excelled at many other things, he was excellent at what he loved. His paintings, drawings, and bronze figurines are part of a significant collection kept at the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York.
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