Stop and Look: Aiding a Comrade by Frederic Remington

Remington was first and foremost a magazine illustrator. His subjects are nearly all drawn from the “Cowboys and Indians” world of the Wild West which featured in stories in popular American magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and was to be associated in the twentieth century with the cinema, and especially with the films that schoolboys thronged to see in cinemas on Saturday mornings. They are action-packed, sometimes depicting famous historical events, like General Custer’s last stand in 1876 at the battle of Little Big Horn. More often they bring graphic reality to the largely fictional lawless life of the cattle-rustlers and gold-seekers who spread throughout the plains and deserts of the still undeveloped, newly-established states between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific coast.

Remington’s particular interest consists in his development of these “Boys Own” images into technically sophisticated oil paintings and bronze sculptures, so that his work could be exhibited and collected like any “serious” works of art. This was the upshot of his powerful ambition to outdo the “illustrator” label and become fully-fledged professional artist. He was an accomplished draughtsman, and had trained at Yale with a thorough knowledge of human and equine anatomy, and understood the principles of pictorial composition as only an illustrator can: not only the rhythms of human figures in dynamic action, but also the values of tonal contrast, of steep recession and void all seen as two-dimensional pattern. His subjects often appeared first in black and white, and were “translated” into colour as paintings.

Individual figures – single horses, or a single horse and rider – became subjects in their own right, on a small scale (he only produced one large-scale sculpture, from the end of his life, The Cowboy, which still stands in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia). 

Perhaps inevitably his painting style is essentially realist, using the pictorial language needed to tell stories and clarify action, but there is a fair admixture in his work of the Impressionist technique that he absorbed from colleagues like Childe Hassam. Among illustrators he was a thorough professional, with the ambition to excel in his field and willingness to tackle any technical challenge. For that reason, his output is imaginative, enormously varied, and usually more rewarding to examine in detail than is suggested by its ostensible purpose of popular entertainment.  He was aways a more interesting figure than that. At the very end of his life he was able to write to a friend: “I am no longer an illustrator.”    

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