: In his heyday, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) was considered one
of America's greatest illustrators and the most talented
interpreters of the American West. His enormously popular and
influential illustrations appeared in a variety of
mass-circulation magazines. Until his final decade, the vigor of
Remington's images tended to overshadow his achievements as an
artist.
Like other great illustrators - notably N.C. Wyeth - Remington
yearned for the respect of the art establishment, which could
come only via serious easel paintings and/or sculpture. "Above
all else," Remington authority Peter H. Hassrick has written, the
artist "wanted one thing in his career - to be recognized as a
painter rather than an illustrator."
In pursuit of his goal to be accepted as a "fine artist" around
1900 Remington began a series of deeply personal canvases that
most interestingly explored the technical and aesthetic
challenges of creating night scenes. (Starting in 1895 he also
created a number of accomplished, animated sculptures.)
In these new paintings Remington replaced the roaring drama of
cavalry charges, the intense color and light of the western
plains, and his crisp, linear style with quieter, more reflective
subjects, a more muted palette and an impressionistic handling of
paint.
Before his premature death, he completed over 70 nocturnal
paintings that retained the West as a theme, but offered skilled
and imaginative images filled with color and light from
moonlight, firelight and candlelight. Drawn from nostalgia for
the West he had known as a young man but that had largely
disappeared by the turn-of-the-century and replete with ominous,
mysterious themes, they were hailed by contemporary critics and
the public. The nocturnes won for Remington the critical acclaim
as a serious painter that he coveted.
