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Lot Essay
On July 12, 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner addressed the American Historical Association in Chicago with a thesis that would reshape how Americans understood their past. Citing the 1890 census as evidence, Turner declared that the frontier—the great moving boundary between wilderness and civilization—had officially closed. “The frontier has gone,” he concluded, “and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” (The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893) Unlike his contemporary and rival Frederic Remington, whose firsthand encounters beyond the Mississippi had begun a decade earlier, Charles Schreyvogel did not venture West until the very year Turner pronounced that frontier extinguished. Yet, his belated pilgrimage proved decisive. Schreyvogel set out to capture the frontier not as legend but as historic record, reconstructing with painstaking accuracy the encounters between Native Americans and U.S. cavalrymen that defined the era’s final chapter. The result was a small but powerful body of work grounded in both drama and detail, exemplified by his 1906 painting Saving Their Lieutenant.
Schreyvogel’s first encounter with the frontier came not through the sweep of open country but under the bright lights of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Like millions of Americans in the late 19th century, he was captivated by Cody’s traveling spectacle—a dazzling pageant of cowboys, Native warriors, and cavalry charges that turned recent history into living myth. Through Cody and his manager Nathan Salsbury, both of whom he befriended, Schreyvogel not only gained a window into the West, but an opportunity to sketch the culture and choreography of frontier life. The experience soon propelled him westward in search of the real thing.
At the age of 32, driven by artistic curiosity and the hope that a drier climate might ease his chronic asthma, Schreyvogel set out for the Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, before continuing on to Arizona. There he observed cowboys, Native Americans, and cavalrymen firsthand, sketching their horses, uniforms, and gestures with ethnographic precision. He also sought out veterans of the Plains Wars—officers, enlisted men, and Native participants alike—recording their stories in careful notes and drawings. These tales of ambushes, rescues, and narrow escapes across open country ignited his imagination. When he returned to his modest studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, Schreyvogel resolved to chronical the history of the frontier with the accuracy of a soldier and the eye of an artist.
His mission was not to romanticize but to reconstruct, turning oral histories and fading memories into a visual record of the frontier’s final decades. This commitment to authenticity defined his method. As Alan Axelrod noted, “In contrast to such artists as Remington and Russell, Schreyvogel worked slowly and painstakingly, scrupulously researching his subjects and executing large canvases.” (Art of the Golden West, New York, 1990) His process was immersive. Drawing on the sketches and accounts he gathered out West, Schreyvogel enlisted athletes as live models and sculpted clay studies of horses to refine his understanding of anatomy and light. At the same time, he consulted veterans to confirm details of weaponry and insignia. His extensive research, combined with a short career and resistance to commercial illustration, left a small but remarkably focused body of work—fewer than 100 major paintings.
The cavalry, with its blend of discipline, vulnerability, and endurance, became Schreyvogel’s central subject. Saving Their Lieutenant embodies this mission at its most dramatic. The composition is kinetic: three troopers charge across a dust-blown plain, one steadying a wounded officer, another turning to fire at a pursuing band of Native warriors as their horses surge forward. It is a painting of action, yet equally of empathy. The wounded lieutenant’s limp body, cradled by his comrades, transforms the martial tableau into a study of loyalty under fire.
By the time Schreyvogel completed Saving Their Lieutenant, his work was already highly regarded. In 1899 he won first prize at the National Academy of Design for My Bunkie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a scene of a cavalryman rescuing a fallen comrade—an emotional and compositional precursor to the present work. When the painting was exhibited in New York in 1900, it elicited comparisons to Remington’s compositionally similar sculpture Wounded Bunkie. Critics soon hailed Schreyvogel as a formidable rival to Remington, who had long defined the visual language of the West. Remington, in turn, came to view the younger artist as an unexpected challenger.
This rivalry came to a head in 1903, when Schreyvogel unveiled Custer’s Demand (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma) in New York. The painting’s debut incensed Remington, who fired off a public letter to The New York Herald accusing Schreyvogel of historical inaccuracies in the soldier’s uniforms. The dispute ignited a national debate over artistic truth and historical fidelity. Custer’s widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, and the general’s former aide, Colonel J.S. Crosby, leapt to Schreyvogel’s defense. Crosby’s rejoinder, printed in several newspapers, was cuttingly humorous: “Of course it must be very annoying to a conscientious artist that we were not dressed as we should have been, but in those days our uniforms in the field were not according to regulations… our clothes were few and far between, and were not changed as regularly as Master Frederic Remington’s probably were at that date.” Privately, President Theodore Roosevelt also sided with Schreyvogel, conceding that his friend Remington “made a perfect jack of himself,” while adding “he was wrong anyway.” (The Life and Art of Charles Schreyvogel: Painter-Historian of the Indian-Fighting Army of the American West, New York, 1969)
After Remington's death in 1909, Schreyvogel assumed a quiet leadership among depicting the West. By the time of his own death from blood poisoning in 1912, he had enjoyed barely a decade of prominence. Yet in that short span, critics and collectors alike came to view him as, in the words of curator Dr. Rick Stewart, “the greatest living interpreter of the Old West” (The American West: Legendary Artists of the Frontier, New York, 1986, p. 77). His canvases, limited in number but immense in impact, preserve a vanished world—its courage, chaos, and contradictions rendered with near-documentary precision. More than an image of combat, Saving Their Lieutenant stands as a meditation on camaraderie and sacrifice at the edge of empire, a scene caught between history and legend. Through Schreyvogel’s eyes, the mythic heroism of the cavalry becomes not an abstraction but a human drama, fraught, fleeting, and deeply felt.
Schreyvogel’s first encounter with the frontier came not through the sweep of open country but under the bright lights of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Like millions of Americans in the late 19th century, he was captivated by Cody’s traveling spectacle—a dazzling pageant of cowboys, Native warriors, and cavalry charges that turned recent history into living myth. Through Cody and his manager Nathan Salsbury, both of whom he befriended, Schreyvogel not only gained a window into the West, but an opportunity to sketch the culture and choreography of frontier life. The experience soon propelled him westward in search of the real thing.
At the age of 32, driven by artistic curiosity and the hope that a drier climate might ease his chronic asthma, Schreyvogel set out for the Ute Reservation in Ignacio, Colorado, before continuing on to Arizona. There he observed cowboys, Native Americans, and cavalrymen firsthand, sketching their horses, uniforms, and gestures with ethnographic precision. He also sought out veterans of the Plains Wars—officers, enlisted men, and Native participants alike—recording their stories in careful notes and drawings. These tales of ambushes, rescues, and narrow escapes across open country ignited his imagination. When he returned to his modest studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, Schreyvogel resolved to chronical the history of the frontier with the accuracy of a soldier and the eye of an artist.
His mission was not to romanticize but to reconstruct, turning oral histories and fading memories into a visual record of the frontier’s final decades. This commitment to authenticity defined his method. As Alan Axelrod noted, “In contrast to such artists as Remington and Russell, Schreyvogel worked slowly and painstakingly, scrupulously researching his subjects and executing large canvases.” (Art of the Golden West, New York, 1990) His process was immersive. Drawing on the sketches and accounts he gathered out West, Schreyvogel enlisted athletes as live models and sculpted clay studies of horses to refine his understanding of anatomy and light. At the same time, he consulted veterans to confirm details of weaponry and insignia. His extensive research, combined with a short career and resistance to commercial illustration, left a small but remarkably focused body of work—fewer than 100 major paintings.
The cavalry, with its blend of discipline, vulnerability, and endurance, became Schreyvogel’s central subject. Saving Their Lieutenant embodies this mission at its most dramatic. The composition is kinetic: three troopers charge across a dust-blown plain, one steadying a wounded officer, another turning to fire at a pursuing band of Native warriors as their horses surge forward. It is a painting of action, yet equally of empathy. The wounded lieutenant’s limp body, cradled by his comrades, transforms the martial tableau into a study of loyalty under fire.
By the time Schreyvogel completed Saving Their Lieutenant, his work was already highly regarded. In 1899 he won first prize at the National Academy of Design for My Bunkie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a scene of a cavalryman rescuing a fallen comrade—an emotional and compositional precursor to the present work. When the painting was exhibited in New York in 1900, it elicited comparisons to Remington’s compositionally similar sculpture Wounded Bunkie. Critics soon hailed Schreyvogel as a formidable rival to Remington, who had long defined the visual language of the West. Remington, in turn, came to view the younger artist as an unexpected challenger.
This rivalry came to a head in 1903, when Schreyvogel unveiled Custer’s Demand (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma) in New York. The painting’s debut incensed Remington, who fired off a public letter to The New York Herald accusing Schreyvogel of historical inaccuracies in the soldier’s uniforms. The dispute ignited a national debate over artistic truth and historical fidelity. Custer’s widow, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, and the general’s former aide, Colonel J.S. Crosby, leapt to Schreyvogel’s defense. Crosby’s rejoinder, printed in several newspapers, was cuttingly humorous: “Of course it must be very annoying to a conscientious artist that we were not dressed as we should have been, but in those days our uniforms in the field were not according to regulations… our clothes were few and far between, and were not changed as regularly as Master Frederic Remington’s probably were at that date.” Privately, President Theodore Roosevelt also sided with Schreyvogel, conceding that his friend Remington “made a perfect jack of himself,” while adding “he was wrong anyway.” (The Life and Art of Charles Schreyvogel: Painter-Historian of the Indian-Fighting Army of the American West, New York, 1969)
After Remington's death in 1909, Schreyvogel assumed a quiet leadership among depicting the West. By the time of his own death from blood poisoning in 1912, he had enjoyed barely a decade of prominence. Yet in that short span, critics and collectors alike came to view him as, in the words of curator Dr. Rick Stewart, “the greatest living interpreter of the Old West” (The American West: Legendary Artists of the Frontier, New York, 1986, p. 77). His canvases, limited in number but immense in impact, preserve a vanished world—its courage, chaos, and contradictions rendered with near-documentary precision. More than an image of combat, Saving Their Lieutenant stands as a meditation on camaraderie and sacrifice at the edge of empire, a scene caught between history and legend. Through Schreyvogel’s eyes, the mythic heroism of the cavalry becomes not an abstraction but a human drama, fraught, fleeting, and deeply felt.