Copyright by Mrs. Frederic Remington. From a photograph by Davis and Sanford.
“THE BRONCO BUSTER”
FROM THE SCULPTURE BY FREDERIC REMINGTON
“I hope I’m not hurting you, Mr. Remington?” said the doctor. Remington answered:
“It’s all right, Doctor—so long as—you don’t—use your spurs.”
Early in his occupancy of the New Rochelle home—perhaps in 1895—he added to his house a studio. This room was twenty by forty feet on the floor, and twenty feet to the roof-tree. A big skylight was in one pitch of the roof; windows with the sills breast-high were on one end, and one side wall. The second end had a double door big enough to admit a horse, or to be opened wide as he painted the horse in the open air outside. All four walls of the studio were covered, above doors and windows and in their dead spaces, with military and Indian and Mexican trappings of all descriptions from spurs to war-bonnets; there were guns of every kind ever carried by an American soldier; all kinds of swords and bridles, saddles, belts, canteens, and cartridge-boxes, powder-horns, bayonets, and knives; there were war clubs, tomahawks, bows, arrows, spears, tom-toms, pipes, scalps, and the wands of medicine-men; moccasins, blankets, beaded deerskins, and the skulls of buffalo, mountain goats, and American carnivora; sombreros, quirts, horsehair lassos, chaps, serapes, ollas, mats, pots, and baskets; in short, not prints or catalogues, but, for all that he might need for any Western picture, the veritable thing itself. He knew the troop and tribe and time and latitude of each. Accuracy in their use was his religion. In his chosen field he abhorred anachronisms. There was considerable éclat over the exhibition of a painting by a new-comer. The subject showed in an Indian fight the rescue of one trooper by another. Remington took one look at it and turned away in disgust. Bits of arms, uniforms, and harness that had never met outside of a museum were assembled in the picture. To the ordinary observer their association was harmonious; but to his expert eye it was falsehood and fake.
In the four arts which he essayed—letters, illustration, painting, and sculpture—Remington was self-taught. His writing was soon abandoned because it was not easy to him, and was not so remunerative as was drawing done in the same time. He had something to say, however, when he did write, and he had an attractive and a graphic style. Great good nature and wholesomeness showed through his lines, and he wrote always from the inside of his subject. It is not the province of this rambling anecdotal recollection of him to attempt an appreciation or a criticism of his art, but one may with propriety note the rapidity with which he overcame the initial difficulties of his tasks and outgrew the unavoidable mistakes of the beginner. Thumbing the older numbers of the magazines in which his earliest illustrations appear,[2] notably those of the Roosevelt articles, one sees that the salient marks of the novice, the small hands and feet of his figures, soon disappear, and in their stead the vigorous members of a master are employed.
Drawn by Frederic Remington