Frederic Remington, mentioned in "the Last Cowboy Song" is one of the most famous of American artists. His paintings and drawings are set in the
West... He went there in the 1880s, when the “West was being won”. The buffalo
were being slaughtered to help clear the land of American Indians. Railroads were being built. There were ranch wars, wars between the large
cattle ranchers and the small farmers who were moving out west and breaking up
the prairie and raising crops.
Born in New York in 1861, Frederic was a poor student. He went out west and tried his hand at ranching
but found it hard work and realised that it would not make his fortune. He had spent some time studying art at Yale,
but had no real career plans. He dabbled
in business, trying to run a hardware store and then a saloon. But when he married, he had to try and find a
way to earn a living.
He illustrated a book by Theodore Roosevelt who had also worked out
West and taken to the adventurous life… Remington’s artistic skills developed just
as the American public began to get interested in the West – in its mythology
and brief history. Easterners were
beginning to read novels and stories about the Frontier, even if they never
went there, and enjoyed his paintings and drawings.
The army was mopping up the last bit of Indian resistance, and
Remington went to paint some of the officers. He did not see Indians as “noble”;
they were in the way of white expansion. He also went to paint for William Randolph
Hearst’s newspaper during the Spanish American war... And was shaken by what he
saw of military action and jungle fighting.
His style of painting was
naturalistic and he painted people, cowboys, Indians, soldiers, hunters etc.,
rather than focussing on the wild landscapes of the West...
He died in 1909, due
to peritonitis, after appendix surgery
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