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Whether he was working in paint, bronze, or prose, Frederic Remington adhered to one basic subject: the American West. His action-charged realism is typified in a 1907 canvas, Cavalry Charge on the Southern Plains, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Remington spent his early twenties working on ranches in Montana and Kansas and, after settling in New York in 1885, made frequent trips throughout the West and Southwest collecting impressions of Native American life, cowboy customs, horses and cattle, and frontier military operations. In the late 1880s, he traveled with the U.S. Army during the rout of the Apache. Remington’s first set of illustrations for Harper’s Weekly, in 1886, won him instant recognition. In 1888 he illustrated a series of articles by Theodore Roosevelt for the Century Magazine, which were published in book form. His illustrations for Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha helped win the published work great popularity. From 1905 on Remington also worked for Collier’s. Although he studied for two years at the Yale School of Fine Arts and more briefly at the Art Students League in New York, Remington was largely self-taught. From drafting brief descriptions of his drawings for magazines, Remington soon advanced to full-length books, of both fact and fiction, always on Western themes. His first novel, John Ermine of the Yellowstone, published in 1902, was adapted as a play.
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