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West Point

Frederic Remington - Master Painter of the American West

Remington was born in Canton, New York in 1861. His mother's family had immigrated from Alsace-Lorraine on the Franco-Prussian border and owned a series of hardware stores. His father's family had reached America from England in 1637, and his father himself served as a colonel in the Civil War, and worked as a newspaper editor and postmaster.

Remington, however, was not the best student as a child. He enjoyed outdoor sports such as hunting, riding and camping, but his math was too poor to attend West Point, a disappointment for his father. Nonetheless, when Remington was 11, the family moved to Ogdensburg, New York, and Remington attended Vermont Episcopal Institute, a church-run military school. He took his first drawing lessons there before transferring to another military school where he developed an ambition to become a journalist, doing art for pleasure. He eventually studied at Yale's art school, the only man in the freshman class.

Even at college though, Remington found himself drawn more towards football and boxing than still life and formal art training. His first published illustration appeared in the student newspaper, Yale Courant, and depicted a bandaged football player. In 1879, Remington stopped studying to look after his sick father, who died a year later. There then followed several years in which he burned through his inheritance in youthful Western adventures. At the age of nineteen, Remington traveled to Montana to look into buying a cattle operation, or a mining interest. He did neither but he did get to see the prairies, the buffalo and battles between the U.S. Cavalry and Native Americans. Harper's Weekly gave him his first commercial publication, printing a sketch that he had submitted.

Remington moved on to Kansas where he bought a ranch and worked as a "holiday stockman" before discovering that cowboy work was hard and dull. After failing to build a hardware store, he returned home, married Eva Caten, and opened a saloon in Kansas City where he also sketched the regulars. The business did poorly, his wife left, and eventually Remington returned to Brooklyn. Reunited with his wife, he studied at the Art Students League of New York, drawing on his experience to submit images of the West to Collier's and Harper's Weekly. On January 9, 1886, Harper's gave him his first cover and later that year sent him to Arizona as an artist-correspondent reporting on the war against Geronimo. The publication then sent him to cover the South Carolina earthquake. It was his first year as a commercial artist, and he had earned $1,200, a good sum for those days.

Remington began adding watercolor to his sketches and to sell his work at art exhibitions. His oil painting Return of the Blackfoot War Party was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and he won a medal at the Paris Exposition. In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt asked him to produce 83 illustrations for his book "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail" and three years later, his first one-man show at the American Art Galleries was a big success. Western Army officers invited him to paint their field portraits, which he did with a photographic quality.

Remington spent much of the 1890s traveling around the US and Mexico, but by now, his celebrity made him a frequent visitor at banquets and stag dinners, and obesity was becoming a problem. In 1898, he illustrated scenes of the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal, creating Scream of the Shrapnel, which focused on the troops rather than the Generals.

In 1908, with a financial crisis weakening art sales and his images out of fashion, he moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut and created works that showed the influence of Impressionism. He died following an emergency appendectomy on December 26, 1909, leaving behind a collection of naturalistic images that became part of the way the West was remembered.

You can find a wide collection of Frederic Remington paint by number patterns at the Segmation web site. These patterns may be viewed, painted, and printed using SegPlay™PC a fun, computerized paint-by-numbers program for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

About the Author

Mark Feldman is President of
SegTech, a company devoted to a wonderful Image Segmentation technology called Segmation.

Segmation - The Art of Pieceful Imaging

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