Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in the genre of Western American Art. His works are known for depicting the Western United States in the last quarter of the 19th century and featuring such images as cowboys, Native Americans, and the US Cavalry.
Early life and education Remington was born in Canton, New York, in 1861 to Seth Pierrepont Remington (1830–1880) and Clarissa (Clara) Bascom Sackrider (1836–1912).
His maternal family owned hardware stores and emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine in the early 18th century.Peggy & Harold Samuels, Frederic Remington: A Biography, Doubleday & Co., Garden City NY, , pp. 7–8. His maternal family, of French Basque ancestry, came to America in the early 1600s and founded Windsor, Connecticut. Remington's father was a Union army colonel in the American Civil War, whose family had arrived in America from England in 1637. He was a newspaper editor and postmaster, and the staunchly Republican family was active in local politics. The Remingtons were horsemen. One of Remington's great-grandfathers, Samuel Bascom, was a saddle maker by trade. Remington's ancestors also fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.
Remington was a cousin of Eliphalet Remington, founder of the Remington Arms Company, which is considered America's oldest gunmaker. He was also related to three famous mountain men: Jedediah Smith, Jonathan T. Warner, and Robert "Doc" Newell. Through the Warner side of his family, Remington was related to George Washington, the first U.S. president.
Colonel Remington was away at war during most of the first four years of his son's life. After the war, he moved his family to Bloomington, Illinois for a brief time and was appointed editor of the Bloomington Republican, but the family returned to Canton in 1867.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 11. Remington was the only child of the marriage, and received constant attention and approval. He was an active child, large and strong for his age, who loved to hunt, swim, ride, and go camping. He was a poor student though, particularly in math, which did not bode well for his father's ambitions for his son to attend West Point. He began to make drawings and sketches of soldiers and cowboys at an early age.
The family moved to Ogdensburg, New York when Remington was eleven and he attended Vermont Episcopal Institute, a church-run military school, where his father hoped discipline would rein in his son's lack of focus and perhaps lead to a military career. Remington took his first drawing lessons at the institute. He then transferred to another military school where his classmates found the young Remington to be a pleasant fellow, a bit careless and lazy, good-humored, and generous of spirit but definitely not soldier material.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 19. He enjoyed making caricatures and silhouettes of his classmates. At 17, he wrote to his uncle of his modest ambitions, "I never intend to do any great amount of labor. I have but one short life and do not aspire to wealth or fame in a degree which could only be obtained by an extraordinary effort on my part."Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 21. He imagined a career for himself as a journalist, with art as a sideline.
Remington attended the art school at Yale University and studied under John Henry Niemeyer. Remington was the only male student in his first year. He found that football and boxing were more interesting than the formal art training, particularly drawing from casts and still life objects. He preferred action drawing and his first published illustration was a cartoon of a "bandaged football player" for the student newspaper, Yale Courant.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 25. Though he was not a star player, his participation on the strong Yale football team was a great source of pride for Remington and his family. He left Yale in 1879 to tend to his ailing father, who had tuberculosis. His father died a year later, at 50, receiving respectful recognition from the citizens of Ogdensburg. Remington's Uncle Mart secured a good-paying clerical job for his nephew in Albany, New York, and Remington would return home on weekends to see his girlfriend Eva Caten. After the rejection of his engagement proposal to Eva by her father, Remington became a reporter for his uncle's newspaper and went on to other short-lived jobs.
Career
Living off his inheritance and modest work income, Remington refused to go back to art school and instead spent time camping and enjoying himself. At 19, he made his first trip west, going to Montana, at first to buy a cattle operation and then a mining interest, but realized that he did not have sufficient capital for either. In the American West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the quickly shrinking bison herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major confrontations of US Cavalry and Native American tribes, scenes he had imagined since his childhood. He also hunted grizzly bears with Montague Stevens in New Mexico in 1895."Frederic Remington", Harper's Weekly, July 1895, p. 240. Though the trip was undertaken as a lark, it gave Remington a more authentic view of the West than some of the later artists and writers who followed in his footsteps, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey, who arrived twenty-five years later when much of the mythic West had already slipped into history. From that first trip, Harper's Weekly printed Remington's first published commercial effort, a re-drawing of a quick sketch on wrapping paper that he had mailed back east.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 36. In 1883, Remington went to rural Kansas, south of the city of Peabody near the tiny community of Plum Grove,The land that Remington owned was closer to what is today the city of Whitewater, which did not exist in 1883 when Remington moved to Kansas. to try his hand at the booming sheep ranching and wool trade, as one of the "holiday stockmen", rich young easterners out to make a quick killing as ranch owners. He invested his entire inheritance but found ranching to be a rough, boring, isolated occupation which deprived him of the finer things he was used to from East Coast life, and the real ranchers thought of him as lazy. In 1884, he sold his land.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 43.
Remington continued sketching, but his results were still cartoonish and amateur. Less than a year after selling his ranch, he went home. After acquiring more capital from his mother, he returned to Kansas City to start a hardware business, but due to an alleged swindle, it failed, and he reinvested his remaining money as a silent, half-owner of a saloon. He went home to marry Eva Caten in 1884. (He had previously asked her father for her hand, but had been turned down—her father was a widower at the time and felt he needed Eva, but after he had remarried, was more amenable.) The young couple returned to Kansas City immediately. Eva was unhappy with his saloon life and was unimpressed by the sketches of saloon inhabitants that Remington regularly showed her. When his real occupation became known, she left him and returned to Ogdensburg.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 54. With his wife gone and with business doing badly, Remington started to sketch and paint in earnest, and bartered his sketches for essentials.
He soon had enough success selling his paintings to locals to see art as a real profession. Remington returned home again, his inheritance gone but his faith in his new career secured, reunited with his wife, and moved to Brooklyn. He began studies at the Art Students League of New York and significantly bolstered his fresh though still rough technique. His timing was excellent, as newspaper interest in the dying West was escalating. He submitted illustrations, sketches, and other works for publication with Western themes to Collier's and Harper's Weekly, as his recent Western experiences (highly exaggerated) and his hearty, breezy "cowboy" demeanor gained him credibility with the eastern publishers looking for authenticity.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 61. His first full-page cover under his own name appeared in Harper's Weekly on January 9, 1886, when he was twenty-five. With financial backing from his Uncle Bill, Remington was able to pursue his art career and support his wife.
Several of his relatives were also artists, including Indian portrait artist George Catlin, cowboy sculptor Earl W. Bascom, and (also on the Bascom side) Frank Tenney Johnson, the "father of western moonlight painting".
In 1886, Remington was sent to Arizona by Harper's Weekly on a commission as an artist-correspondent to cover the government's war against Geronimo. Although he never caught up with Geronimo, Remington did acquire many authentic artifacts to be used later as props, and made many photos and sketches valuable for later paintings. He also made notes on the true colors of the West, such as "shadows of horses should be a cool carmine & Blue", to supplement the black-and-white photos. Ironically, art critics later criticized his palette as "primitive and unnatural" even though it was based on actual observation.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 74.
After returning East, Remington was sent by Harper's Weekly to cover the 1886 Charleston earthquake. To expand his commission work, he also began doing drawings for Outing magazine. His first year as a commercial artist had been successful, earning Remington $1,200, almost triple that of a typical teacher.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1982, p. 81. He had found his life's work and bragged to a friend, "That's a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher to come to New York with $30 and catch on it 'art'."Peggy & Harold Samuels, Remington: The Complete Prints, Crown Publishers, New York, 1990, p. 13,
For commercial reproduction in black-and-white, he produced ink and wash drawings. As he added watercolor, he began to sell his work in art exhibitions. His works were selling well but garnered no prizes, as the competition was strong and masters like Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson were considered his superiors. A trip to Canada in 1887 produced illustrations of the Blackfoot, the Crow Nation, and the Canadian Mounties, which were eagerly enjoyed by the reading public.
Later that year, Remington received a commission to do eighty-three illustrations for a book by Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail to be serialized in The Century Magazine before publication.Peggy & Harold Samuels, 1990, p. 15. The 29-year-old Roosevelt had a similar Western adventure to Remington, losing money on a ranch in North Dakota the previous year but gaining experience which made him an "expert" on the West. The assignment gave Remington's career a big boost and forged a lifelong connection with Roosevelt.