Not long after that he bought a set of tools. Ruckstuhl sent him a supply of modeler’s wax, and he began his “Bronco Buster.” It was characteristic of the man that his first attempt should be a subject difficult enough as a technical problem to have daunted a sculptor of experience and a master of technic. His love of the work when he got at it, his marvelous aptitude for an art in which he had never had a single lesson, are some evidence that it was possibly his métier. His few bronze groups and figures that rapidly followed “The Bronco Buster,” and his heroic equestrian monument of “The Pioneer” in Fairmont Park, are the work of one who surely would have excelled in sculpture if he had lived to follow it.
Remington thought he believed in “art for art’s sake,” but I know of nothing that he ever did in any of its departments that did not primarily attempt a story. His wish to tell something that had touched him, and tell it at first hand, was as primitive as the instinct of a caveman.
The boy in the nursery wants something that will go. There is a kinship in Remington’s frequently expressed choice of an epitaph:
“He Knew the Horse.”
His death occurred December 26, 1909. On January 1, 1912, the present Democratic administration of New Rochelle was formally installed. It transacted no business that day except to pass a resolution requesting the New Haven Railroad, which was constructing a new station near Remington’s old home, to call that stop “Remington Place.” The railroad graciously complied. Remington’s fellow sculptor, Robert Aitken, has under way a portrait bust of him and four pedestal bas-reliefs. This monument is to be set up fronting the station, and perhaps it, too, will carry that commemorating phrase.
[2] See THE CENTURY for January, April, July, and August, 1889, June, 1896, and February, 1902.
Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson
“PEGGY”
FROM THE MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN