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122

Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas by Frederic Remington-S

Currency:USD Category:Firearms & Military Start Price:200.00 USD Estimated At:500.00 - 900.00 USD
Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas by Frederic Remington-S
Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas by Frederic Remington is an original woodblock that measures 29 1/2 by 23. It is being presented by the Sid Richardson Museum Store of Fort Worth Texas. This limited edition wood engraving was pulled from the wood block used to illustrate Frederic Remington's "Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas" which was published in Harper's Weekly, December 21, 1889. The wood block is now the property of the Sid Richardson Museum. Each numbered print is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Also in the mid-1880s Remington moved from illustration to water-color and oil painting. The transformation from magazine illustrator to fine artist required Remington to apply himself to learning the intricacies of color, a task he found daunting. He remained devoted to Western subjects, using photography and studies produced on numerous excursions into the frontier as guides for more permanent works, which he completed in his studio in New Rochelle, New York. His oil A Dash for the Timber (1889), which depicts cowboys fleeing on horseback from Native warriors, is seen to demonstrate many of the notable qualities of Remington's art of this period, including strong narrative content, masculine energy, and realistic detail. After 1900 he experimented with a subtler and more limited palette in such nocturnal scenes as The Old Stagecoach of the Plains. In 1903 he was awarded an exclusive contract with Collier's to provide a painting for each monthly issue of the magazine, and this agreement provided Remington with a secure income. Commenting on his paintings in 1903, Remington told Edwin Wildman in Outing: "Big art is a process of elimination. Cut down and out-do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about-to imagine. What you want to do is just create the thought-materialize the spirit of a thing." The final years of Remington's life saw the production of a number of impressionistic works, but he never fully adopted the techniques of Impressionism or eliminated the narrative element from his works. Begins Work in Bronze In 1895 Remington began sculpting in bronze, a medium that he believed would prove more lasting than illustration or painting. He wrote to his friend the novelist Owen Wister at the time, "My oils will all get old mastery-that is, they will look like pale molasses [sic] in time-my watercolors will fade-but I am to endure in bronze-even rust does not touch.-I am modeling-I find I do well-I am doing a cowboy on a bucking bronco and I am going to rattle down through all the ages." The work he described, The Bronco Buster (1895), won immediate praise from contemporary art reviewers, and Remington produced another 24 sculptures in the remaining years of his career. Among the most recognized of these is the 1902 multifigured work Coming through the Rye, which was based on Remington's earlier drawing Cowboys Coming to Town for Christmas. Depicting four exuberant horsemen riding close together in obvious revelry, the work has, in the words of Michael Edward Shapiro in his Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, "become an icon, and its emblematic role transcends its flaws. Etched into popular consciousness in a way that is rare in the annals of American sculpture, it has been widely accepted as an image of the untrammeled life of the West." Legacy and Contribution In addition to numerous trips into the American West, Remington also visited Canada and Mexico in pursuit of the subjects of his art. He produced nearly 3, 000 drawings and paintings, 25 sculptures, and eight volumes of writings throughout his career. He died December 26, 1909 following an emergency appendectomy that was performed at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Remington's works are housed in the Remington Art Memorial, in Ogdensburg, New York, as well as in such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, and the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, among others. According to Peter Hassrick in The Way West: Art of Frontier America, "The scope of Remington's art was truly remarkable, " and he noted that "In his career after 1900, Remington served also as a bridge between the tradition of narrative Western art and a new sensitivity toward the quiet passing of the frontier." McCracken, recognizing Remington's continuing appeal to Western enthusiasts and art collectors in the later 20th century, concluded, "In his pictures and his writings, Remington left for the benefit of the generations that follow him, what is beyond doubt one of the most comprehensive documentary records of our Old West and its transition into the limbo of history-and for this alone he deserves our everlasting gratitude One of the finest and most focused collections of Western art in America, this Fort Worth Museum features paintings of the 19th Century American West by Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell and other artists. The works, reflecting both the art and reality of the American West, are from the collection of the legendary Texas oilman and philanthropist, Sid W. Richardson (1891-1959).Since opening in 1982, the Museum has been one of historic Sundance Squares top attractions.
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