Nearly a century after his death, Frederic Remington remains the most celebrated of all Western artists. The thousands of dynamic depictions of “western types” that he created as an illustrator, sculptor, painter, and author were pivotal in the creation of the mythic American West. His influence has been so profound and all-encompassing that for many who admire his work Frederic Remington and the American West are synonymous.

Reminiscing in 1905, Remington wrote that his quest was to record vestiges of the vanishing west before it was obliterated by the inevitable and escalating changes then overtaking the region. “I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever,” he said, “and the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed. Without knowing how to do it, I began to record some facts around me, and the more I looked the more the panorama unfolded.”

Born in upstate New York, Remington developed an early fascination with the West. Nevertheless, he remained a lifelong Easterner. As a student at Yale, his two preoccupations were football and art, but he excelled in neither. It was not until he inherited money in 1881 and went west for the first time that he set his course as an illustrator. From then on, he traveled west to gather material for his words and images, but continued to create them back home in New York.

It was after his return in 1886 from an extended trip to the Southwest that he sold his first illustrations to Harper’s Weekly, launching a career as a journalist and illustrator for this and other popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Outing, and Century. As his drawing skills improved, his popularity grew. In 1888, when Theodore Roosevelt’s serialized magazine articles Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, illustrated by Remington, were published as a book, Remington’s career was firmly established. His fame was further enhanced when he began to reproduce his work in prints such as the lithograph U. S. Cavalryman from his portfolio, A Bunch of Buckskins.

Although the heyday of the Wild West was the stuff of history and lore by the time Remington went west, he was undaunted. He relied on old-timers’ tales, eyewitness accounts, and his vivid imagination to recreate the Indians, Indian fighters, and cowboys who populate his work. Perhaps because he felt the disappearance of the Old West so keenly, many of his paintings and illustrations are tinged with a sense of the loss and nostalgia he felt for the West he never knew. As seen in his series “The Evolution of the Cowboy,” his sympathetic portrayals of “cow punchers” as heroic yet doomed figures, as the modern age obliterated the romance of the past, helped establish the cowboy as the quintessential American hero.

In 1895, at the urging of a friend who declared that Remington was not a “draftsman” but a sculptor, he completed his “astonishing” first sculpture, an equestrian work titled The Broncho Buster, which was a true masterpiece. He wrote to his friend, the author Owen Wister, that he had found a recipe “for being Great. . . . In time my watercolors will fade—but I am to endure in bronze. . . . I am doing a cowboy on a bucking broncho and I am going to rattle down through all the ages.” To another friend he wrote, “Did I tell you I was about to become a great sculptor?” Over the next fifteen years, he produced twenty-one sculptures. The Broncho Buster became the most popular American bronze of the period; scores of the work were cast over the next decades. True to Remington’s prediction, his sculptures have remained among his most popular and durable works, capturing as they do the essence of the western spirit he wished to immortalize. His third and fourth sculptures were The Wicked Pony, which reverses the format of The Broncho Buster, and The Scalp, his first sculpture in which the horse stood on more than two legs.

By the 1890s, Remington again had charted a new course when he decided to become a fine artist rather than a “mere illustrator.” His motive for this dramatic shift was not inspired by compliments and encouragement, as his sculpting had been, but was a result of humiliating public criticism of his paintings. In 1888, one critic wrote that “his splendid reputation as an illustrator for the magazines has failed to satisfy the ambition of an artist who bids fair to become equally established as a professional painter.” The criticism stung, but also spurred Remington to master the idiom of impressionist painting. He began to concentrate on mastering design and color values, which had not been important in his monochromatic illustrations with their emphasis on line and story rather than color and design. It was not until twenty years later, in 1908, that he was finally satisfied that he had transcended the limitations of illustration. Elated by the success of his exhibition at a prestigious New York gallery, he wrote to a friend, “My show made a great hit this winter. . . . I am no longer an illustrator.”

The shocking end to his career came soon after his triumphant declaration, when he suffered a fatal attack of appendicitis. Just forty-eight years old when he died, Remington the mythmaker almost instantly became myth, a giant among Western artists and the prime architect of the timeless romance of the West.