Frederic Remington

Crooked Trails Frederic Remington

Frederic Sackrider Remington (1861-1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry. His style was naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic, and usually veered away from the ethnographic realism of earlier Western artists. His focus was firmly on the people and animals of the West, with landscape usually of secondary importance. His collaboration with Owen Wister on The Evolution of the Cowpuncher, published by Harper?s Monthly in September 1893, was the first statement of the mythical cowboy in American literature, spawning the entire genre of Western fiction, films, and theater that followed. He was one of the first American artists to illustrate the true gait of the horse in motion. The galloping horse became Remington?s signature subject, copied and interpreted by many Western artists who followed him, adopting the correct anatomical motion.