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Lot Essay
Harold McCracken wrote, “Frederic Remington had two particularly strong affinities in his character throughout his life. Probably first was his deep interest in the horse. This is indicated by the fact that he wanted his epitaph to be: ‘He knew the horse’; and, coincidentally, it was the military and the horses they rode…It was only natural that one of his works of sculpture should be a Trooper of the Plains.” The final sculpture ever copyrighted in Remington’s lifetime, Trooper of the Plains 1868 represents the culmination of a decades-long devotion to the iconography of the frontier on canvas and in bronze. Of the many figures depicted throughout his career, the trooper appears repeatedly in his works with an acute attention to detail and accuracy for every article and accessory of his uniform. Like a film still, Trooper of the Plains 1868 masterfully combines Remington’s unmatched technical precision with his ability to capture rigorous movement in a single moment, literally preserving the disappearing West in a frozen moment in time.
When Remington started sketching ideas for the model in 1908, he had in mind a figure from a bygone era and looked to history. His paintings of troopers, such as The Stampede (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma) and Cutting Out Pony Herds (Private Collection), directly inspired the model for the present work, bringing the determined figure to life in three-dimensional form. Allen and Marilyn Splete write, “Remington was able to portray the horse and rider in bronze with the same dramatic tension that he achieved in his paintings. Unlike the stiff and formal sculpture of the time, his work has motion and action, which give it a timeless appeal.” (Frederic Remington-Selected Letters, New York, 1988, p. 365) Characteristic of the artist’s gravity-defying sculptures, the present work is one of only two of Remington’s models to lift all four of the horse’s hooves off the ground, second to The Cheyenne. Here, the horse and figure are suspended weightlessly above a single bushel of sagebrush, posed with extraordinary balance and anatomical accuracy.
Given Remington’s untimely death shortly after the copyrighting of the model, nearly all of the 15 known authorized casts of Trooper of the Plains 1868 were cast posthumously by Roman Bronze Works. Cast by 1916, the present work is number 5 in the edition. Other casts are housed in institutional collections including the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.
When Remington started sketching ideas for the model in 1908, he had in mind a figure from a bygone era and looked to history. His paintings of troopers, such as The Stampede (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma) and Cutting Out Pony Herds (Private Collection), directly inspired the model for the present work, bringing the determined figure to life in three-dimensional form. Allen and Marilyn Splete write, “Remington was able to portray the horse and rider in bronze with the same dramatic tension that he achieved in his paintings. Unlike the stiff and formal sculpture of the time, his work has motion and action, which give it a timeless appeal.” (Frederic Remington-Selected Letters, New York, 1988, p. 365) Characteristic of the artist’s gravity-defying sculptures, the present work is one of only two of Remington’s models to lift all four of the horse’s hooves off the ground, second to The Cheyenne. Here, the horse and figure are suspended weightlessly above a single bushel of sagebrush, posed with extraordinary balance and anatomical accuracy.
Given Remington’s untimely death shortly after the copyrighting of the model, nearly all of the 15 known authorized casts of Trooper of the Plains 1868 were cast posthumously by Roman Bronze Works. Cast by 1916, the present work is number 5 in the edition. Other casts are housed in institutional collections including the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.