1861-1909 Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 - December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. Remington was the most successful Western illustrator in the ??Golden Age?? of illustration at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, so much so that the other Western artists such as Charles Russell and Charles Schreyvogel were known during Remington??s life as members of the ??School of Remington??. His style was naturalistic, sometimes impressionistic, and usually veered away from the ethnographic realism of earlier Western artists such as George Catlin. His focus was firmly on the people and animals of the West, with landscape usually of secondary importance, unlike the members and descendants of the Hudson River School, such as Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, who glorified the vastness of the West and the dominance of nature over man. He took artistic liberties in his depictions of human action, and for the sake of his readers?? and publishers?? interest. Though always confident in his subject matter, Remington was less sure about his colors, and critics often harped on his palette, but his lack of confidence drove him to experiment and produce a great variety of effects, some very true to nature and some imagined. His collaboration with Owen Wister on The Evolution of the Cowpuncher, published by Harper??s Monthly in September 1893, was the first statement of the mythical cowboy in American literature, spawning the entire genre of Western fiction, films, and theater that followed. Remington provided the concept of the project, its factual content, and its illustrations and Wister supplied the stories, sometimes altering Remington??s ideas. (Remington??s prototype cowboys were Mexican rancheros but Wister made the American cowboys descendants of Saxons??in truth, they were both partially right, as the first American cowboys were both the ranchers who tended the cattle and horses of the American Revolutionary army on Long Island and the Mexicans who ranched in the Arizona and California territories).  Related Paintings of Frederick Remington :. | The Fall of the Cowboy | His First Lesson | Turn Him Loose, Bill | A Cavalryman's Breakfast on the Plains | If Skulls Could Speak |
Related Artists:
Felix Vallotton
French 1865-1925 Felix Vallotton Gallery Swiss woodcut artist and painter. Associated with the Nabis, he worked in Paris. Vallotton rejuvenated the woodcut medium as a creative technique. His boldly cut designs, conceived as arrangements in black and white, depict Parisian society with wit and intelligence. A painting, Swiss Landscape, is in the Lyman Allyn Museum, New London,
Nicolas Maes
1634-1693 Dutch Nicolas Maes Galleries Nicolaes Maes, also known as Nicolaes Maas (January 1634, Dordrecht - buried November 24, 1693, Amsterdam) was a Dutch Baroque painter of genre and portraits. Maes was the son of Gerrit Maes, a prosperous merchant, and Ida Herman Claesdr. In about 1648 he went to Amsterdam, where he entered Rembrandt's studio. Before his return to Dordrecht in 1653 Maes painted a few Rembrandtesque genre pictures, with life-size figures and in a deep glowing scheme of colour, like the Reverie at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Card Players at the National Gallery, and the Children with a Goat Carriage. So closely did his early style resemble that of Rembrandt, that the last-named picture, and other canvases in the Leipzig and Budapest galleries and in the collection of Lord Radnor, were or are still ascribed to Rembrandt. In his best period, from 1655 to 1665, Maes devoted himself to domestic genre on a smaller scale, retaining to a great extent the magic of colour he had learnt from Rembrandt. Only on rare occasions did he treat scriptural subjects, as in Hagar's Departure, which has been ascribed to Rembrandt. His favorite subjects were women spinning, or reading the Bible, or preparing a meal. While he continued to reside in Dordrecht until 1673, when he settled in Amsterdam, he visited or even lived in Antwerp between 1665 and 1667. His Antwerp period coincides with a complete change in style and subject. He devoted himself almost exclusively to portraiture, and abandoned the intimacy and glowing color harmonies of his earlier work for a careless elegance which suggests the influence of Van Dyck. So great indeed was the change, that it gave rise to the theory of the existence of another Maes, of Brussels. Maes is well represented at the London National Gallery by five paintings: The Cradle, The Dutch Housewife, The Idle Servant, The Card Players, and a man's portrait. At Amsterdam, besides the splendid examples to be found at the Rijksmuseum, is the Inquisitive Servant of the Six collection. At Buckingham Palace is The Listening Girl (repetitions exist), and at Apsley House Selling Milk and The Listener. Other notable examples are at the Berlin, Brussels, St Petersburg, the Hague, Frankfort, Hanover and Munich galleries.
Orozco, Jose Clemente
Mexican, 1883-1949 Mexican mural painter. When he lost his left hand at age 17, he abandoned architectural studies for painting, pursuing Mexican themes. As a caricaturist for a revolutionary paper, he explored Mexico City's slums and painted a series of watercolours, House of Tears, on the lives of prostitutes. The reaction of moralists forced him to flee to the U.S. in 1917, but in 1919 the new government of Álvaro Obreg??n welcomed him back, and he joined Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros in creating large-scale murals for public buildings, in which he continued his radical social commentary. Again forced to abandon Mexico in 1927, he worked until 1934 in the U.S., where his style evolved and matured in murals from coast to coast. In 1934, his international reputation firmly established, he returned to Mexico and embarked on his most technically impressive and emotionally expressive murals, including Catharsis (1934),