Frederic Sackrider Remington
Frederic Remington (1861-1909)
Frederic Sackrider Remington was born in Canton, New York, the only child of Seth Pierre and Clara Sackrider Remington. Remington's father had organized a cavalry regiment of New York volunteers during the Civil War, and stories of this conflict undoubtedly inspired Remington's lifelong interest in the military. The family moved to nearby Ogdensburg in 1872, and four year later, the fifteen-year-old boy enrolled at Highland Military Academy. Remington began his art studies with John Henry Niemeyer at Yale in 1878 but left the college two years following his father's unexpected death. A brief stint at the Art Students League in 1886 provided his only other formal art training.
Remington made his first trip west of the Mississippi in 1881 and visited the West eighteen times during the next two decades. He briefly maintained a studio in Kansas City, Missouri, but after marrying Eva Caten in 1884, he returned East to make his name as an illustrator for the popular press. Aside from his travels in the western United States and Mexico, Remington visited Germany, Russia, and North Africa with journalist Poultney Bigelow during the early 1890s and served as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Remington became well known for his military and western subjects. His early work, which was especially prized for its meticulous detail and high degree of realism, may have been influenced by such French academic painters as Adolphe de Neuville, Ernest Meissonier, and Edouard Detaille. Although Remington received immediate recognition for his illustrations, he preferred to promote himself as a creator of fine art. In the late 1890s he began incorporating the heightened colors of Impressionism into his canvases. He began working in bronze in 1895, and developing in this new medium many of the themes of his earlier paintings. Remington moved to New Rochelle in 1890. He bought a summer home on Ingleneuk Island, in the St. Lawrence River, in 1899. He exhibited his work at the National Academy of Design, winning the Clark and Hallgarten Prizes in 1888 and became as associate member in 1891. During the last decade of his career his work was shown at Clausen Gallery, Noé Gallery, and Knoedler Gallery in New York and at Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston. He died suddenly at age forty-eight in Ridgefield, Connecticut, following an appendectomy.
“Infantryman in Field Costume” (“The Infantryman”), 1890
Watercolor and goauche on illustration board, 18 x 10 in. (45.7 x 25.4 cm)
Signed and dated (lower left): “Frederic Remington / --90 with compliments to / No. 4--J. S. Hartley--; (under mat) U. S. Infantryman in service trim with compliments to J. S. Hartley.”
Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1952.16)
Remington made his reputation with such watercolors as “Infantryman in Field Costume”, produced to illustrate popular periodical articles documenting the rapidly disappearing western frontier. During his tremendously successful career, Remington frequently traveled with members of the United States Army, from whom he was able to gather anecdotal information and visual impressions for use in his drawings, watercolors, paintings, and sculptures. By accompanying the soldiers on their campaigns against the Indians, Remington developed a thorough knowledge of military protocol and created for his eastern audience some of the most compelling descriptions of the Indian wars then available. By 1890, when “Infantryman” was created, Remington had consolidated his reputation as a recorder of military life with his illustrations of the Sioux uprising at the Battle of Wounded Knee, in South Dakota.
“Infantryman” is one of the illustrations that Remington created for an article by John Gregory Bourke, captain of the Third Cavalry, which celebrated the exploits of General George Crook (1829-1890). (1) Crook had graduated from West Point in 1852 and risen through the ranks to major-general in command of the department of the Missouri in 1888. During the twelve years that Bourke served as his aide-de-camp, from 1871 to 1883, Crook was almost constantly engaged in military actions that took him to New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, and the Dakotas. (2)
In “Infantryman”, Remington carefully described the uniform and accessories of a field soldier. The artist usually traveled with a pencil and a camera and collected military gear in his studio in order to ensure the accuracy of his portrayals. A "military type" rather than a portrait of a specific individual, the infantryman in Remington's image is well equipped: he carries a rifle slung over his shoulder, a canteen at his hip, a knife at his right, and a leather pouch with a sturdy tin drinking cup. Remington's appreciation and sympathy for the United States Army is evident in this image—“Infantryman in Field Costume” depicts a healthy good-looking individual, sure of his equipment and confident in his abilities.
Remington inscribed “Infantryman” as a gift to Jonathan Scott Hartley, a friend and professor of anatomy at the Art Students League, in New York during the 1870s. Both men were nominated to the National Academy of Design the year this image was published--Remington as an associate member and Hartley as a full academician. Remington also owned a small plaster sculpture by Hartley, and he may have offered the older artist this watercolor as a token of his esteem. (3)
MEB
Bibliography:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, “Frederic Remington: A Biography” (Austin: University of Texas, 1982); Michael Edward Shapiro et al., “Frederic Remington: The Masterworks”, exhib. cat., (Saint Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 1988); James K. Ballinger, “Frederic Remington” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989).
Notes:
1. John G. Bourke, "General Crook in the Indian Country," “Century Magazine” 41 (March 1891): 643-60.
2. John Gregory Bourke, “On the Border with Crook” (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1891); and Martin F. Schmitt, “General George Crook, His Autobiography” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946).
3. Shapiro et al., “Frederic Remington”, pp. 190, 210-11.
