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Lot Essay
Asked in 1903 who he imagined as the audience for his art, Frederic Remington replied, “Boys—boys between 12 and 70.” The answer captured the nostalgia and vicarious thrill that animated both his subjects and their admirers. For Americans raised on dime novels and frontier tales, Remington’s paintings offered a continuation of that boyhood fantasy—of courage tested on open ground, of discipline and duty in a lawless world. Painted circa 1895, The Trooper and His Mare distills that sensibility: a lone cavalryman and his horse stand together in the glare of the Western sun, figures of endurance as much as adventure. The painting reflects the yearning that runs through all of Remington’s work: a longing to witness, and to belong to, the heroism he so carefully rendered.
Remington long believed that America itself offered artists a worthy subject and that the nation’s identity could be expressed through its own terrain and those who served upon it. For him, the cavalry embodied both symbol and structure: an emblem of order set against an untamed landscape. As art historian James K. Ballinger has observed, “officers of the army saw Remington as their great promoter.” In the decades after the Civil War, when public hero-worship had shifted toward industrial and political figures, the everyday courage of enlisted men in the Indian Wars went largely uncelebrated. Remington filled that void. His paintings and illustrations revived the figure of the American soldier as an icon of discipline and endurance. “He thought heroes and heroics were crucial to understanding American life,” Ballinger notes, “a characteristic which has been lost a century later.” (After the Hunt: The Art Collection of Wiliam B. Ruger, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2002, pp. 142–44)
Under the heat of the Western plains, Remington’s composition places a cavalryman beside his horse in a moment of rare stillness. The trooper’s navy uniform, faded from the sun and dust, is complemented by the mottled gray of his mare. In the distance, a group of soldiers and mounts lingers at rest, their presence anchoring the scene without breaking its calm. The mood is one of pause rather than action—an interlude between marches and maneuvers, marked by discipline and endurance. Through this balance of restraint and quiet, Remington transforms an ordinary episode of military life into something emblematic: man and horse united in patience and resolve, embodiments of the measured strength he saw as central to the American soldier.
The trooper in The Trooper and His Mare may be more than a representative soldier. Scholars have suggested that his features recall Remington’s Self-Portrait on a Horse (circa 1890, Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), a likeness that suggests a personal dimension beneath the composure. Remington’s fascination with military life ran deep. The son of a decorated Union cavalry officer, he grew up steeped in stories of regimental valor and order. As an artist-correspondent in the 1880s, he followed U.S. troops across the Southwest for Harper’s Weekly, Outing Magazine and The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, sketching scenes from the Geronimo campaign through the final years of the Indian Wars. Though never enlisted, he rode with cavalry units, studied their drills and gear, and befriended officers who shared vivid accounts of frontier service—all while retaining the manner and bearing of an Easterner playing among the ranks. Shaped by proximity rather than participation, his understanding of the army was intimate but idealized. In The Trooper and His Mare, that blend of nearness and remove becomes visible: the work of a civilian who stood just outside the ranks, translating observation into exacting identification.
Remington’s regard for the military extended beyond American borders. Through his studies and wide exposure to illustrated journals, he encountered the work of French academic and military painters Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille, Alphonse-Marie de Neuville, and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. These artists, chroniclers of the Franco-Prussian War and the Napoleonic campaigns, idealized the dignity of the French soldier rather than the chaos of battle. Remington absorbed that ethos and translated it westward to the American frontier. As writer Julian Ralph observed in 1895, “Without imitating any Frenchman, without an inspiration that he consciously owes to France, he yet is French in the stubborn allegiance to truth that he puts in every picture he makes.” (Frederic Remington: Masterworks, New York, 1988, p. 77) Like Detaille’s dragoon or Meissonier’s cuirassier, his cavalrymen are studies in discipline and devotion.
More than a century later, the audience Remington imagined for his works persists. The same appetite for courage, mastery, and spectacle that once drew “boys between 12 and 70” to his paintings now animates our imagination in shows like Yellowstone, Westworld, and a century of frontier cinema shaped by his vision. In The Trooper and His Mare, Remington gave form to that enduring ideal—the lone figure defined by discipline, endurance, and resolve before the vast, lawless expanse of the frontier. His riders still move through our collective imagination, their outlines sharpened by film and myth, but their spirit unmistakably his.
Remington long believed that America itself offered artists a worthy subject and that the nation’s identity could be expressed through its own terrain and those who served upon it. For him, the cavalry embodied both symbol and structure: an emblem of order set against an untamed landscape. As art historian James K. Ballinger has observed, “officers of the army saw Remington as their great promoter.” In the decades after the Civil War, when public hero-worship had shifted toward industrial and political figures, the everyday courage of enlisted men in the Indian Wars went largely uncelebrated. Remington filled that void. His paintings and illustrations revived the figure of the American soldier as an icon of discipline and endurance. “He thought heroes and heroics were crucial to understanding American life,” Ballinger notes, “a characteristic which has been lost a century later.” (After the Hunt: The Art Collection of Wiliam B. Ruger, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 2002, pp. 142–44)
Under the heat of the Western plains, Remington’s composition places a cavalryman beside his horse in a moment of rare stillness. The trooper’s navy uniform, faded from the sun and dust, is complemented by the mottled gray of his mare. In the distance, a group of soldiers and mounts lingers at rest, their presence anchoring the scene without breaking its calm. The mood is one of pause rather than action—an interlude between marches and maneuvers, marked by discipline and endurance. Through this balance of restraint and quiet, Remington transforms an ordinary episode of military life into something emblematic: man and horse united in patience and resolve, embodiments of the measured strength he saw as central to the American soldier.
The trooper in The Trooper and His Mare may be more than a representative soldier. Scholars have suggested that his features recall Remington’s Self-Portrait on a Horse (circa 1890, Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth, Texas), a likeness that suggests a personal dimension beneath the composure. Remington’s fascination with military life ran deep. The son of a decorated Union cavalry officer, he grew up steeped in stories of regimental valor and order. As an artist-correspondent in the 1880s, he followed U.S. troops across the Southwest for Harper’s Weekly, Outing Magazine and The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, sketching scenes from the Geronimo campaign through the final years of the Indian Wars. Though never enlisted, he rode with cavalry units, studied their drills and gear, and befriended officers who shared vivid accounts of frontier service—all while retaining the manner and bearing of an Easterner playing among the ranks. Shaped by proximity rather than participation, his understanding of the army was intimate but idealized. In The Trooper and His Mare, that blend of nearness and remove becomes visible: the work of a civilian who stood just outside the ranks, translating observation into exacting identification.
Remington’s regard for the military extended beyond American borders. Through his studies and wide exposure to illustrated journals, he encountered the work of French academic and military painters Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Detaille, Alphonse-Marie de Neuville, and Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. These artists, chroniclers of the Franco-Prussian War and the Napoleonic campaigns, idealized the dignity of the French soldier rather than the chaos of battle. Remington absorbed that ethos and translated it westward to the American frontier. As writer Julian Ralph observed in 1895, “Without imitating any Frenchman, without an inspiration that he consciously owes to France, he yet is French in the stubborn allegiance to truth that he puts in every picture he makes.” (Frederic Remington: Masterworks, New York, 1988, p. 77) Like Detaille’s dragoon or Meissonier’s cuirassier, his cavalrymen are studies in discipline and devotion.
More than a century later, the audience Remington imagined for his works persists. The same appetite for courage, mastery, and spectacle that once drew “boys between 12 and 70” to his paintings now animates our imagination in shows like Yellowstone, Westworld, and a century of frontier cinema shaped by his vision. In The Trooper and His Mare, Remington gave form to that enduring ideal—the lone figure defined by discipline, endurance, and resolve before the vast, lawless expanse of the frontier. His riders still move through our collective imagination, their outlines sharpened by film and myth, but their spirit unmistakably his.