The Bronco Buster
Sulla scultura
A technical achievement in bronze, this composition of a cowboy attempting to tame a horse portrays an idea of the Western United States in dramatic and violent terms: white settler-colonialists in the act of subduing nature and flesh. As a painter and illustrator, Frederic Remington garnered success by crafting mythic, romanticized views of frontier life; The Bronco Buster was his first attempt to do so in sculpture. For white audiences living east of the Mississippi River at the turn of the 20th century, the artist's triumphant figures came to represent a singular—and distorted—vision of an unfamiliar American West.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Scheda
- Numero di inventario
- 1982.808
Nel frattempo, nella vita di Frederic Remington
Tutta la vitaSeptember 1893
“The Evolution of the Cowpuncher” with Owen Wister
In September 1893 Harper’s Monthly publishes “The Evolution of the Cowpuncher”, Remington’s collaboration with Owen Wister — the first statement of the mythical cowboy in American literature, which spawned the whole genre of Western fiction, films and theatre that followed. Remington supplied the concept, the factual content and the illustrations; Wister supplied the stories, sometimes altering Remington’s ideas.
January 1897
To Cuba as a correspondent for Hearst's paper
His association with Roosevelt, then New York City Police Commissioner, pays off: the artist is hired as a war correspondent and illustrator for William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and sent to Cuba with the celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis. Cuba's apparent peacefulness leaves them nothing to report; in a famous but probably apocryphal exchange of telegrams, Remington says there will be no war and he wishes to return, and Hearst replies that the artist should furnish the pictures and he will furnish the war. Remington returns to New Rochelle while Davis remains.
12 February 1897
The “Olivette Incident”: a sensational illustration
Shocked by the story of Clemencia Arango, who said she had been deported from Cuba for her revolutionary activities and strip-searched before boarding the Olivette, Davis dispatches the news to Hearst. The front page of the Journal for 12 February is dominated by Remington's sensationalist illustration, run across five columns, of Arango stripped naked on the ship's deck, surrounded by three Spanish officials; Hearst dubs it the “Olivette Incident”. The issue sells a record number of copies, almost a million, and the next day Arango calls Remington's version largely a fabrication, saying that only a single female police matron had inspected her, in a private setting.
