“How do you get that peculiar alkali, yellowish air of the plains?” I asked, as we stood before an example of Mr. Remington’s art.
“Only by having lived there, and after a dint of study. That is a dust study.”
“And those blue shadows are correct?”
COLOR OF THE PLAINS.
“Yes; you cannot have a black shade out in the open, and the atmosphere there causes that particular shade. That one above, though, which is also a study, shows an almost steel gray shadow, while that other one is still darker. These are ‘color notes,’ of Indian ponies, and bronchos. There is no crest or arch to their necks. They are really degenerated horses, but they can go.”
On a pedestal was a casting of the “Broncho Buster.”
“You must have modeled in clay before you did that.”
“No, that was my first attempt. I had never put my hands to clay before. Painting and modeling are about the same. You must know anatomy in both. I never intended to have it cast, but some of my friends, on seeing it, said I should, so I had it done. ‘Bunkie,’ which means, in the army, ‘comrade,’ is my second work.”
It was only in 1885 that Mr. Remington turned his whole attention to art. On leaving Yale, where he was more devoted to football than to study, he served for a brief period as confidential clerk to Governor Cornell, at Albany. But that life was too prosaic; and, in 1880, he caught the fever, “to go west.” He went to Montana, and became a “cow-puncher.” Later, he made money on a Kansas mule ranch, and was cowboy, guide and scout in the southwest. When he had run through what he had earned, he returned to Kansas City, where the shops displayed his first work. They possessed the now well-known Remington style, but the colors were daubed on so that they looked like chromos, although the drawings had that muscular dash and action for which his work is noted.