NEW YORK CITY—Headlining Christie’s Visions of the West: The William I. Koch Collection evening auction January 20 was a Frederic Remington oil on canvas painting, “Coming to the Call,” which went well over its $6/8 million estimate to attain $13,285,000, including the buyer’s premium. The circa 1905 painting was done late in the artist’s career, a mere few years before he died in 1909. Best known for his bronzes, Remington created an artwork here that broke with his past style in a move to a more modern style. It was around this time that fellow artists were freeing up form and being more expressive in their treatment of light and atmosphere. “Remington, too, began to move beyond narrative description toward a more atmospheric and reduced vocabulary,” according to Christie’s catalog essay for this painting.
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