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Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story

June 10 - October 29, 2006

 

An exhibition on view June 10 through October 29, 2006, at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story, explores an unusual and significant aspect of the artist's career: his ongoing fascination with the American Civil War. Although Remington rarely painted Civil War scenes, his legendary depictions of the American West echo the gripping themes and images of this bloody conflict that both inspired and haunted him.

 

(above: " Frederic Remington, The Last Lull in the Fight, 1903. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Manoogian Collection.)

 

(above: Compare with Last Lull: Three Confederate Prisoners, Gettysburg, 1863. Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

 

Frederic Remington (1861-1909), noted illustrator, painter, sculptor, and author, started making western art in the mid-1880s, just when two dominant attitudes emerged nationally about the Civil War: Reconciliation and the Lost Cause. "It was a time when Southerners were viewed increasingly -- even in the North -- as glorious heroes fighting against all odds for their homes and honor," says exhibition curator Alexander Nemerov, Ph.D. "It was a time when former enemies shook hands and the war's enormous bloodshed became increasingly repressed and romanticized."

 

(above: Frederic Remington, What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost, 1895. Oil on canvas. Collection of Yale University Art Gallery.)

 

(above: Compare with What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost: Timothy O'Sullivan, Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 1866. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.)

During his career Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings and paintings, 22 bronze sculptures, a novel, a Broadway play, and over 100 articles and stories. At the end of the 19th century, Remington immortalized the Western experience. His romanticized vision of the heroic nature of American settlers defined a nation's character as one of independence, individualism, and stoic heroism, qualities that still resonate in American popular culture.

"A consummate reporter-artist, Frederic Remington became best known for the vigor and authenticity of his illustrations which appeared in the periodicals of his day," notes Curator of Illustration Art Stephanie Plunkett. "While he defined national sensibilities through romanticized images of the cowboy on the American frontier, Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story brings together a rich tapestry of visual materials and cultural artifacts that invite a new understanding of Remington's West."

 

(above: Frederic Remington, The Rescue of Corporal Scott, 1886. Engraving. Harper's Weekly, August 21, 1886. Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum.)

 

Original Remington paintings, drawings, and sculptures from public and private collections, archival Civil War photography, and select books and periodicals are included in this absorbing exhibition that sheds an entirely new light on a great American illustrator and artist. The Cavalryman's Breakfast on the Plains (c 1892, Amon Carter Museum) and A New Year on the Cimarron (1903, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) are among the master works featured. What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost (1895, Yale University Art Gallery), one of five illustrations created for The Evolution of the Cow Puncher by Owen Wister, author of The Virginian (1902), provides a central focus for this groundbreaking exhibition, which invites a reconsideration of Remington's artistic contributions.

"Frederic Remington and Norman Rockwell created influential visual cultural legacies that defined our nation for eager mass media audiences. Remington invented our 19th century cultural understanding of the American West and Rockwell created our cultural understanding of the 20th century. Each remains a heroic figure of their time," said Museum Director Laurie Norton Moffatt.

 

(above: Frederic Remington, Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, Tenth Cavalry, 1888. Oil on canvas (fragment).  Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum.)

 

Guest curator Alexander Nemerov, Ph.D., is a professor of art history at Yale University and the author of The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824; Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America; and Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures. He has also written essays on Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Putnam, Abbott Thayer and Charles Russell. A 60-page illustrated catalogue, written by Dr. Nemerov to accompany the exhibition, will be available for purchase at the Museum Store and online at www.nrm.org.

 

About Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-1909)

Frederic Remington was born in 1861 in Canton, New York, near the St. Lawrence River. When he was just two months old, his father, newspaper owner and editor, Seth Remington, set out to participate in the Civil War, which was then in force. After raising a squadron of cavalry in the well-known Eleventh New York Cavalry, he returned home four year later with a distinguished military record to resume his work and to get to know his young son.

An active, strong-willed boy, Frederic Remington enjoyed athletics and drawing, and his school books were filled with sketches of soldiers, horses, and Native Americans. At Yale University's School of Fine Arts, which he attended briefly, he endured the academic rigors of his art classes, but had a passion for football and boxing. In the middle of his second year, after his father died, he left Yale and accepted a clerical position at the Governor's office in Albany, for which he was not well suited.

In 1881, lured by the mystique of the American West, he set out to retrace the steps of his heroes, Lewis and Clark and George Catlin. A few months later, he returned home with a sack full of rough, robust drawings gleaned from first-hand experience. Harper's Weekly purchased one of these, which was redrawn by William A. Rogers and published on a full page. After a second trip, he invested in a Kansas sheep ranch, and his art began to appear regularly in the popular periodicals of the day, including Harper's Weekly, St. Nicholas, and Outing, bringing him great success. His love of the West was evident, as he returned there frequently, collecting new material for illustrations and reporting on current events ­ from the Indian Wars to wagon trains, trappers, buffalo hunters, cattle ranchers, and the establishment of settlements. Until the early 20th century, when his paintings became more lyrical, he objectively recorded and documented the rapidly disappearing American frontier.

In 1898, urged by artist Frederic Ruckstull, Remington began to experiment with sculpture, for which he was naturally talented. His first attempt resulted in The Bronco Buster, a noted work charged with movement, energy, and a sense of authenticity. "I always had a feeling for mud," he said, "and I wanted to do something a burglar wouldn't have, moths eat, or time blacken." He continued to captivate American audiences with his published illustrations until 1903, when he began painting and sculpting solely for exhibition. Unconcerned with literal reporting, his gallery paintings emphasized a more romanticized, reflective approach to Western subjects.

Frederic Remington interrupted his work with Western themes in 1898 when he went to Cuba as a war correspondent and illustrator during the Spanish Civil War. There he met and developed a life-long friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. When Remington died of appendicitis in 1909 at the age of 48, Roosevelt's eloquent eulogy read, "The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horse and the cattle of the plains will live in his pictures, I verily believe, for all time."

 

Exhibition description

A hallmark exhibition and the first of its kind, Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story will examine an overlooked but significant aspect of Frederic Remington's celebrated career ­ the great Western artist's ongoing engagement with the American Civil War.
 
Frederic Remington rarely painted Civil War scenes, but the war haunts his depiction of the West, as reflected in his portrayals of cowboys and troopers. Just as the most famous turn-of-the-century novel about the West is called The Virginian, so Remington's art, like the western literature of Owen Wister, examines the West through the lens of North and South. Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum and developed by guest curator Alexander Nemerov, a noted author and professor of art history at Yale University, this important exhibition promises to present Remington in an entirely new light.
 
What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost (1895), one of five illustrations that Remington created for Owen Wister's story, The Evolution of the Cow Puncher, provides a central focus for the exhibition and for a scholarly catalogue essay that presents Alexander Nemerov's groundbreaking thesis for the first time. The painting fits Wister's purpose to chronicle the cowboy of Texas in his heyday during the late 1860s and 1870s, when "battle and murder and sudden death," as Wister wrote, were "every-day matters." Yet the author poses a compelling question. "What if this picture is not about the American West?" "What if," he asks, "the painting's view of the Old West relies heavily on the imagery of another conflict ­ namely, the American Civil War?" This important exhibition and its accompanying catalogue essay ask us to consider how this would change our understanding of Remington's West, not just in this What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost, but in the artist's larger body of work as well.
 
Frederic Remington and the American Civil War: A Ghost Story illuminates these considerations by bringing together a rich tapestry of visual materials and cultural artifacts, including original paintings, drawings, and sculptures from public and private collections, archival Civil War photography, and select books and periodicals of the artist's day. Though Remington's art was not overtly about the Civil War, the new ideas of Reconciliation and the Lost Cause permeate his art, just as they are reflected in Wister's literature. This thesis, put forth by one of the most highly regarded art historians of our times, will serve as a lasting record that will serve scholars across the disciplines of art, history, and visual culture studies for generations to come.
 

Introduction and label text

To this day, Frederic Remington remains the most famous artist of the Old West. Born in Canton, New York, in 1861, Remington lived and worked in New York State and Connecticut, but his paintings and sculptures of cowboys, Indians, and troopers still stand out as vivid portrayals of the western frontier. In a career that spanned some twenty-five years, from the mid-1880s until his death in 1909, Remington made thousands of illustrations for Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly, and other periodicals. He also made sculptures and avidly sought a reputation as a fine-art painter. In all this work his depictions of the army, Indian, and ranching life of the West gave imaginative expression to a passing phase of American history. By the time he died, Remington's art was widely accepted as a visual record of a lost era-a guide to the gore and the glory, the blazing guns and the blazing suns, of the Old West.
 
Another moment of American history, however, somehow intrudes in Remington's art-the American Civil War. Remington rarely depicted the Civil War explicitly. His father had been a distinguished Union officer, but the childhood drawings to your right, together with two more pictures elsewhere in this gallery, are among Remington's only direct Civil War subjects. Yet Civil War imagery haunts his art of the West, informing his depictions of stalwart troopers, dejected cowboys, and battlefield carnage. This exhibition explores these ghostly echoes of North and South in Remington's art of the West.
 
These two works, one known now only in reproduction, are some of Remington's few explicit Civil War scenes. Note the similarities between the untitled image of Union troopers dazed, wounded, and dead and the western painting What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost, elsewhere in this gallery.
 
What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost, one of Remington's vivid scenes of the Old West, shows the aftermath of a gun battle between warring factions of cowboys on the Texas frontier some time in the late 1860s or 1870s. In ways difficult to explain, the painting with its flat array of dead men and story of fraternal strife seems haunted by the most famous of Civil War battlefield photographs, Timothy O'Sullivan's A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863.
 
 
The Red Badge
 
Remington made his paintings of battlefield destruction at a time when various writers graphically depicted Civil War casualties. Most famous of these was Stephen Crane in his novel The Red Badge of Courage. Crane's descriptions borrow from photographs such as A Harvest of Death and The Field Where General Reynolds Fell (to your right) in ways that echo Remington's own references to these images. Crane published The Red Badge of Courage in October 1895, one month after Remington's What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost appeared in Harper's Monthly. Independently, the two men became equally fixated on these stark photographs.
 
Remington's early drawing of sleeping soldiers innocently shows the boredom or exhaustion of soldierly life, but it also oddly calls to mind the clumped bodies of Timothy O'Sullivan's Field Where General Reynolds Fell.
 
Remington's depiction of Native American casualties alludes to photographs of the aftermath of the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890) but also back to the burial parties and cluttered corpses of the Civil War, such as those in two photographs taken at Antietam in 1862.
 
The relation of Remington's images to Civil War photographs is always indirect. Never explicit, it is almost certainly never intentional. In The Two Men Climbed Slowly, an 1897 reproduction of a lost Remington original, the dead Indian warrior slumped at the base of rocks differs from the lone rebel in Alexander Gardner's Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, yet seems haunted by this well-known photograph. Arthur Keller's illustration for The Virginian, the famous western novel published by Remington's friend Owen Wister in 1902, seems also derived from photographs such as Gardner's.
 
 
Last Stand and Lost Cause
 
Remington made many paintings of Last Stands -- groups of brave frontiersmen stoically fighting to the end against overwhelming odds. These pictures allude to former Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, but they also suggest the southern side of the Civil War. Remington painted these works when the Confederacy was increasingly -- and romantically -- understood as a Lost Cause: as a belief, a way of life, defended by a few outnumbered men, rough and undaunted. The echoes of Civil War photography in Remington's Last Lull in the Fight intensify this connection, suggesting that at the turn of the century the West became a place to re-imagine the values of the Old South.
 
Remington's Episode in the Opening Up of a Cattle Country calls to mind illustrations of brave Confederate soldiers in Century magazine's immensely popular series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1884-1887), which appeared in the same years as this early Remington work.
 
Remington made his first and most famous bronze, The Bronco Buster, after watching the sculptor Frederick Ruckstull create a large Civil War equestrian monument of Union Major General John F. Hartranft (inset). The Bronco Buster is a totally different work -- much smaller, with a western theme -- yet connections to the Civil War remain. Specifically, Remington transformed the Union general into a figure with Confederate connotations. When Remington made his one large-scale sculpture, The Cowboy (reproduced on the wall in front of you), he called the figure a "good type of the old Texas cowboys" of the 1880s. For Remington's friend Owen Wister, too, cowboys were typically southerners and even sometimes explicitly ex-Confederate soldiers who had gone West after the war.
 
Remington's heroic Texan is located in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, not far from Ruckstull's sculpture in Harrisburg, suggesting that in an era of Civil War Reconciliation, when former foes shook hands at battlefield reunions, all regions of the nation could be celebrated, a Texan no less than a native northerner, even in the vital Union state of Pennsylvania.
 
The most famous western novel of Remington's time or any time has a southern name. The Virginian was written by Remington's friend Owen Wister and published in 1902. Set in Wyoming Territory, the novel is explicitly about North-South Reconciliation, with the Virginia-born hero courting and marrying the Vermont schoolteacher Molly Stark. The novel is also about the West as a place where the Virginian's and the author's conservative social philosophies can manifest themselves anew. A huge seller, The Virginian was later made into an early sound movie starring Gary Cooper. Wister wrote the novel in Charleston, South Carolina, where the Civil War began.
 
John Massey Rhind's Calhoun Monument (1894-1896), in Charleston, South Carolina, where Owen Wister wrote The Virginian (1902).
 
 
Two Works of 1903
 
Remington painted the elegiac New Year on the Cimarron the same year that W. E. B. Du Bois published his famous book The Souls of Black Folk. Each is a response to the aftermath of the Civil War. Remington's melancholy Texas frontiersmen, their way of life evaporating like the nearly dry riverbed, evoke comparable figures of Last Stands and Lost Causes elsewhere in this gallery. (See for example the photograph of Confederate prisoners on the wall behind you.) Du Bois, meanwhile, lamented the failure of Reconstruction, which left emancipated African Americans as high and dry, as lonely and dispirited, as Remington's forgotten outcasts.
 
Remington's famous painting The Stampede, shown here in a 1913 reproduction, strangely evokes the thousand-gun clamor of war. The deafening noise, the bright flash, the terror of a lone man in a chaotic situation -- the image suggests Henry Fleming's panic-stricken flight in Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. Remington's cowboy, though, is recognizably one of his southern types, a version of "the adventurous sons of Kentucky and Tennessee," in Wister's words, who abandoned soldiering and became cowboys after the war. Unintentionally -- but with great vividness -- Remington's West became a place where heroic southern defeat could be played out again and again.
 
Remington's Cavalryman's Breakfast on the Plains unmistakably echoes Winslow Homer's Civil War scenes of camp life like the two engraved illustrations before you. The allusion to Homer gives Remington's troopers a Yankee pedigree and a Union association.
 
Not all Remington's allusions to Confederates are sympathetic, as they are elsewhere in this exhibition. Lieutenant Sherer, Seventh Cavalry, Standing Off a Mob at the Stock-Yards, part of Remington's coverage of the 1894 Pullman Strike in Chicago, casts the strikers in the position of Homer's Rebels, matching newspaper coverage that likened the strikers to seceding southerners.
 
Remington, whose father was a Union officer and a staunch Lincoln supporter, sometimes made western art strongly supporting the policies of Reconstruction. The Rescue of Corporal Scott, showing Lieutenant Powhatan Clarke valiantly saving a wounded member of the all-black Tenth Cavalry, calls to mind Thomas Ball's well-known sculpture, The Emancipation Group -- with Clarke in Lincoln's position of savior. That Clarke was from Virginia only emphasized Remington's view of a post-Civil War America where citizens of all regions might help a black person rise up.
 
Leaving the Canyon, another of Remington's Reconstruction scenes, shows members of the Tenth Cavalry working efficiently to lift a wounded Apache prisoner up a cliff. The black men operate with dignity, and the white officer presiding above seems almost like an afterthought. Remington's scene is a direct contrast to crude racist stereotypes of those same years, such as Currier and Ives's popular Darktown series.
 
The Return of Gomez to Havana, a scene based on Remington's experience covering the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898, shows the liberation of a black populace in a way that illustrates popular slogans about that war -- Cuba Libre -- even as it also conjures racial emancipation in the Civil War. In his other Cuban work Remington linked the two conflicts as wars of liberation. The Battle of San Juan Hill, the most famous fight in the Spanish-American War, took place on July 1, 1898, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
 
Remington's western art grew out of the Civil War in unexpected fashion. When fabled Union general and ex-President Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885, journals such as Harper's Weekly devoted lavish attention to this great Civil War figure. Soon after, Remington's West emerged as a place of thrilling adventure in the pages of the same journal. The vibrant energy of Indian Scouts on Geronimo's Trail replaced the somber procession of Grant's funeral, and the West rose out of the Civil War's ashes as a new topic of public fascination. Yet Remington's West also became a place where the traumas and ideologies of the Civil War-the ongoing, lasting effects of that vast conflict -- could live on in strange and surprising ways.
 
Remington's image depicting army training exercises in Florida prior to the Spanish-American War represents the strange spectacle of American servicemen marching through the South again, not so many years after Sherman's March across similar Palmetto lands. The uniforms are different but the presence of blue-clad soldiers on southern land was not. The thinness and paleness of the watercolor wash gives the picture an unintended ghostliness even though Remington's aim was strictly journalistic: he made the painting for reproduction in the New York Journal.

Checklist for the exhibition

Thomas Ball
Emancipation Group 1865
Bronze
Collection of the Montclair Art Museum
34 _ x 21 x 13
 
Frederic Remington
The Color Sarg't ca.1876
Pen and ink with watercolor on paper
Collection of R.W. Norton Art Foundation
9 _ x 6 _
 
Frederic Remington
The Captain ca.1876
Pen and ink with watercolor on paper
Collection of R.W. Norton Art Foundation
7 _ x 6 _
 
Frederic Remington
A Battle Scene ca.1876
Pencil and watercolor on lined paper
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
7 _ x 13
 
Frederic Remington
On the Evening of the 4th of May ca.1876-1877
Pencil and crayon on paper
Collection of R.W. Norton Art Foundation
7 _ x 7 _
 
Frederic Remington
Civil War Battle Scene ca.1885
Ink on paper
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
14 _ x 22 _
 
Frederic Remington
The Noonday Halt 1887
Ink on paper
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
8 _ x 13 3/8
 
Frederic Remington
Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, Tenth Cavalry 1888
Oil on canvas (fragment)
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
10 _ x 12 _
 
Frederic Remington
An Episode in the Opening up of a Cattle Country 1887
Oil on board
Collection of the Autry National Center, Museum of the American West
17 _ x 24 7/8
 
Frederic Remington
A Cavalryman's Breakfast on the Plains ca. 1892
Oil on canvas
Collection of the Amon Carter Museum
22 x 32 1/8
 
Frederic Remington
The Coffee Call 1893
Lithograph
Collection of the Amon Carter Museum
 
Frederic Remington
Leaving the Canyon ca.1894
Watercolor on paper
Collection of the Autry National Center, Museum of the American West
25 _ x 20
 
Frederic Remington
The Bronco Buster 1895
Bronze
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
Height 22 1/8 x base 21 _ x width 10 _
 
Frederic Remington
What an Unbranded Cow Has Cost 1895
Oil on canvas
Collection of Yale University Art Gallery
28 1/16 x 35 1/8
 
Frederic Remington
After the Dull Knife Fight (Battle of War Bonnet Creek) ca.1897
Oil on canvas
Collection of The Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art
27 _ x 40 _
 
Frederic Remington
U.S Troops Practicing Marching in Palmettos 1898
Pen and ink wash on paper
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
19 _ x 29 _
 
Frederic Remington
Return of Gomes to Havana 1899
Oil on canvas
Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
27 x 40
 
Frederic Remington
A New Year on the Cimarron (A Courier's Halt to Feed) 1903
Oil on canvas
Collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
27 x 40
 
Frederic Remington
The Last Lull in the Fight 1903
Oil on canvas
Courtesy of the Manoogian Collection
30 _ x 61
 
Frederic Remington
The Virginian 1929
Lithograph
Collection of the Autry National Center, Museum of the American West
42 _ x 28 _
 
 

Supporting Material

 
Alexander Gardner
Burying the Dead after the Battle of Antietam 1862
Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
 
Timothy O'Sullivan
A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July 1863
Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 1866
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
 
Alexander Gardner
Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg, July 1863 1863
Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 1866
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
 
Alexander Gardner
Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg, July 1863 1863
Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, 1866
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration
 
Anonymous Photographer
Three Confederate Prisoners, Gettysburg 1863
Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
 
A.C. Redwood
Cobb's and Kershaw's Troops Behind the Stone-Wall
Century 32, August 1886
Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
 
T. de Thulstrup
General Grant's Funeral ­ The Procession Passing Up Fifth Avenue 1885
Harper's Weekly, August 15, 1885
Collection of William and Penny Hargreaves
 
Frederic Remington
The Rescue of Corporal Scott 1886
Harper's Weekly, August 21, 1886
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
 
Frederic Remington
The Apache War ­ Indian Scouts on Geronimo's Trail 1886
Harper's Weekly, January 9, 1886
Collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum
 
Ambrose Bierce
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians 1891
San Francisco: E.L.G. Steele, 1891
Collection of the Abernathy Collection of American Literature,
Middlebury College Library
 
Harold Frederic
Marsena and Other Stories of Wartime 1894
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894
Collection of Amherst College Library
 
Frederic Remington
Lieutenant Sherer, Seventh Cavalry, Standing Off a Mob at the Stock-Yards 1894
Harper's Weekly 38, July 28, 1894
Courtesy of Stanford University Libraries
 
Anonymous Photographer
Calhoun Monument, Charleston 1894-96
Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
 
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage 1895
First edition
Collection of the Abernathy Collection of American Literature
at Middlebury College Library
 
Anonymous Photographer
Photograph of Frederick Wellington Ruckstull posing with clay model of sculpture of Major General John F. Hartranft ca. 1895
Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great by F.W. Ruckstull
New York: G.P. Putnams Sons, 1925
Courtesy of the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
 
Frederick Wellington Ruckstull
Equestrian Sculpture of Major General John F. Hartranft ca.1895
Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great by F.W. Ruckstull
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1925
Capitol Building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee
 
Frederic Remington
The Two Men Climbed Slowly 1897
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, August 1897
Collection of William & Penny Hargreaves
 
Owen Wister
The Virginian 1902
New York: Macmillan 1902
Collection of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center
 
W.E.B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk 1903
First edition, third printing
Inscribed and autographed
Collection of the University of Massachusetts
 
Frederic Remington
Cutting Out Pony Herds
Collier's Weekly, February 1, 1913
Collection of the University of Massachusetts

 

Editor's note: RL readers may also enjoy:

and these articles and essays on Western genre art:

 

and this video on Frederic Remington:

Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days is a 58 minute American Masters series 1991 video filmed in high definition format. It was directed by Thomas L. Neff and produced by Home Vision Entertainment.

This program traces the career of the brilliant painter, sculptor and author Frederic Remington. Hundreds of original artworks are showcased while narration by Gregory Peck, interviews. Location footage, archival footage and period photographs create an illuminating frame around the works of one of America's finest artists. Frederic Remington: The Truth of Other Days also explores Remington's direct influence on filmmakers such as John Ford and his continuing influence on today's popular culture.

 

 

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