“I TOOK YE FOR AN INJIN”

Remington’s first work was in black-and-white India-ink washes. He was skilled with the pen, but to achieve values by multiplied strokes was foreign to both temperament and training. As those technically informed are aware, but as not all readers know, his illustrations, like all printed pictures, since the direct drawing upon boxwood and lithographic stone was superseded, were made on a large scale and reduced by photographic processes to the size needed for the printed page. He usually worked on a cardboard twenty-four by thirty inches, or thereabout, in size. From black-and-white washes he advanced to black-and-white in oils, and again from these to canvases of such color in flat fields as lent themselves to the earlier reproductions for magazine covers and double pages. During all of this time he was acquiring a technic that grew through the various stages of his contemporaries’ estimate from rebuke to admiration.

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

THE PACK-HORSE MEN REPELLING AN ATTACK BY INDIANS

FROM THE PAINTING BY FREDERIC REMINGTON

[❏
LARGER IMAGE]

It was an exhibition of Charles Rolla Peters’s moonlights, about 1894, that gave Remington his most serious wish to paint. The mystery of these efforts and their largeness were keyed to the mute though not inglorious poet in him. He came to see and to master the nuances of the moon’s witchery in all her moods. It was interesting to follow his awakened and developing sense of color. Nature on that side made more and more appeal to him, until in our Sunday-morning and weekday-evening tramps the tints of sky and field and road almost totally dislodged the phantom soldiery from the hillsides.

About 1896 Ruckstuhl, the sculptor, set up a tent on a vacant lot back of our place at New Rochelle, New York, and began in clay the construction of the half-size model for the heroic equestrian statue of General Hartranft that now stands in bronze in front of the State-house at Harrisburg. It was Remington’s first intimate view of sculpture in the making. The horse especially interested him. During the two months that the sculptor labored, Remington made daily visits to the Ruckstuhl tent. The following winter I was sitting one day in his studio watching him at an illustration for some story of Owen Wister’s. He was working “chic,” that is to say, without models, and was making his first marks in charcoal. His outline began to show a cow-boy in the foreground of a bar-room shooting toward the back of the picture, into the perspective of which ran the bar and its stampeding clientele. As it occurred to him that the bulking figure of the local egotist obscured too much of other interesting detail, he quickly dusted off the drawing and reversed his characters, thereby making the aggressor stand in the background and putting the victims to the front. With equal ease he could have put his cow-boy to either side of the room. I said to him:

“Frederic, you’re not an illustrator so much as you’re a sculptor. You don’t mentally see your figures on one side of them. Your mind goes all around them.”