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Frederic Sackrider Remington (American, 1861–1909),
Bronco Buster
, 1895
bronze, height: 24½, 62.23 cm
Bequest of N.P. Dodge, 1954.303
Perhaps the best known of all of the artists of the American West, Frederic Remington was born at Canton, New York, and studied art at Yale University before making his first trip into the West in 1881. After an unsuccessful attempt at ranching in Kansas, he sold his first Western sketch to Harper’s Weekly in 1886. The same year he moved to New York to establish a studio and to study at the Art Students League. Over the next four years, Remington returned often to the West, usually on assignments from various publishers, to document life on the settling frontier. By 1890 more than two hundred of his illustrations had appeared in Harper’s, Century, and Outing magazines and in numerous books, several of which he himself authored.
Remington ultimately became one of the highest paid illustrators of his day. In 1887 he began exhibiting his work at the National Academy of Design, as well as in shows of the American Watercolor Society and the Brooklyn Art Club. In 1895 he produced his first successful bronze sculpture, Bronco Buster. This was followed over the next fourteen years by twenty-one additional bronzes, most of them of horses and riders. Joslyn’s Bronco Buster exhibits the artist’s celebrated flair for depicting dramatic action as well as his technical mastery of a difficult medium, earning Remington a permanent place in the history of American art.
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