After Frederic Remington, Etching Printed on Glass. Title: "In With the Horse Herd." Printed by Lucid Lines in the 1970s, a company which is now out of business. 

Overall: 24 X 20 in. 

Sight: 19 1/2 X 13 1/2 in. 

#3837 . 

Frederic Remington was born in Canton, New York in 1861. In his lifetime this extraordinary polymath became the most successful and famous Western American artist. His immense talents included work as an illustrator, author, sculptor, and fine artist. He was influenced early on by his father Seth Pierpont Remington, a Republican journalist who founded the St. Lawrence Plaindealer. His father had been a captain in the Civil War, and in 1870 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him United States Collector of the Port of Ogdensburg, New York. In 1876 Remington enrolled at Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts where he studied for the next two years. He then enrolled at Yale for one year to study in the School of Fine Arts. His two loves at the time were art and football, but after publishing his first illustration in the on-campus newspaper Yale Courant his focus began to shift more towards the former. In 1879 he met his future wife Eva Caten, who at first rejected his marriage proposal. Distraught over this and his father's death from tuberculosis within the same month, he decided to head out to the American West to "find himself." After sketching in Montana for a while he settled in Kansas City, Missouri in 1883 to run a sheep ranch, which went under after one year. Although Eva joined him and accepted his new proposal of marriage, he squandered the rest of his inheritance drinking in local saloons. Finally, in 1885, a series of his illustrations were sold to Harper's Weekly, which allowed the couple to move to New York City. The following year he attended the Art Student League, by which time his illustrations were earning him $1,200 annually. He developed a mutual friendship with Theodore Roosevelt after creating a serial about the future president's life for The Century Magazine, and was introduced to Social Darwinism ("survival of the fittest") as Roosevelt championed the United States military’s aggressive campaigns against the Native Americans. In 1888 Remington started contributing short stories along with illustrations to multiple magazines. His writings teemed with romantic Western stories full of drama and violence. Initially they presented the cavalrymen as the hero and the indigenous people as the villain, with his version of the “wild frontier” inspiring and shaping the rest of the country's impressions of both government policy and life beyond the Mississippi River. In 1891 the National Academy of Design elected Remington as an Associate member, and his financial success and national celebrity allowed the family to move into a mansion called Ednion in New Rochelle. Although his writings and illustrations were what he was best known for at the time, he began to focus more and more on sculpture, with his detailed bronzes some of the most famous and collectible of any American artist. In 1900 Remington began working with Riccardo Bertelli at Roman Bronze Works in Brooklyn to cast by the lost-wax casting process which allowed higher detail in the finished product. The Mounted Cowboy (his only monumental bronze) was commissioned in 1905 by the Fairmount Park Art Association in Philadelphia and unveiled in May of 1908. His last work, The Stampede, was modeled in late 1909 but had to be finished by the accomplished sculptor Sally Farnham. So prolific was his output in his short life that art historians often divide it into five periods: illustration, academic Realism, nocturnal paintings, Impressionism, and finally Symbolism. His second home, Lorul Place, was built in Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1909, but by this time he was studio bound due to morbid obesity and declining health. He died on December 26th of that year after an emergency appendectomy led to peritonitis. His legacy lives on in over 5,000 pieces of art he created over multiple mediums, with countless artists inspired by his style and vision throughout the next century and beyond. The Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York was opened in 1981 in the house where Eva and her sister moved after Remington's death, and contains many paintings, thousands of sketches, two bronzes and his library.