An Argument with the Town Marshall

In the stillness of a Western night, tension has already taken hold. A lone rider wheels his horse in the dust of a moonlit street, the animal checked mid-turn, one foreleg lifted from the ground, its shadow slicing through the dark. The cowboy’s pistol flashes once, twice, as brief ruptures of light ricochet across the clapboard façades of a sleeping town. As the townspeople awaken, light spills from doorways onto the street. Yet we see only one man, the challenger. In An Argument with the Town Marshall, Frederic Remington fixes this confrontation on a single figure, held in a moment of arrested motion. The marshall is absent, invoked in the work’s title but implied beyond the tightened composition. The air seems to crackle between them, the long main street of a cowtown stretching into darkness—an archetype of the American imagination, steeped in the drama of the West and rendered in oil and shadow.

When An Argument with the Town Marshall appeared in the pages of Collier’s Weekly in February 1905, its scene would have been instantly legible to readers steeped in the lore of the frontier. The cowboy and the lawman had become central characters in America’s national theater: independent, armed, and bound by their own codes. The cowtowns and boomtowns of the West were places where men like Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp kept order after dark, when whiskey and boredom met with predictable violence.

Remington understood that mythology as well as anyone. He had ridden with cavalry units, camped with scouts, and chronicled life on the frontier as an artist-correspondent. Yet by the turn of the century, the world he had painted firsthand was already vanishing. “I knew the railroad was coming—I saw men already swarming into the land,” he wrote in the pages of Collier’s the following month. “I knew the derby hat, the smoking chimneys, the cord-binder, and the thirty-day note were upon us in a resistless surge. I knew the wild riders and the vacant land were about to vanish forever, and the more I considered the subject the bigger the Forever loomed.” (“A Few Words from Mr. Remington,” Collier's Weekly, March 18, 1905, p. 16)

It was precisely this awareness that fueled his next transformation. In 1903, Remington signed an exclusive contract with Collier’s Weekly to produce 12 paintings a year for publication. The arrangement freed him from the treadmill of illustration and offered something new: artistic autonomy. His pictures would no longer accompany stories but stand alone as full-color spreads across single and double pages. For the first time, he could choose his subjects and shape their mood as he pleased. These were not illustrations in the old sense but independent compositions, distilled from memory and invention alike.

The arrangement liberated him from the onerous demands of illustration and allowed him to pursue full recognition as a painter. Aware of the shifting currents in art, his inclination now was toward restraint, to remove all unnecessary detail and extraneous information from his pictures. “Big art is a process of elimination,” he observed, “do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, New York, 1988, p. 134) The nocturnes became his laboratory for that philosophy.

Between 1903 and his death in 1909, Remington produced approximately 70 nocturnes. In these works, light itself (or the lack thereof) directs the drama. Campfires flicker through the haze; moonlight breaks on rain and snow; reflections glide over quiet lakes; gunfire pierces the dark like falling stars. Scholars have long compared these canvases to the tonal harmonies of James McNeill Whistler and the atmospheric experiments of the American Tonalists, but Remington’s approach remained distinctly his own. He never abandoned narrative altogether—there was always a rider, a sentinel, a point of human tension. What changed was the relationship between story and surface. The paint grew looser, the edges softer; gesture replaced outline. In the cool undertones of An Argument with the Town Marshall, one senses both a painter pushing toward modernism and a chronicler mourning the loss of his subject.

Technically, the painting demonstrates a new confidence with color. The palette is pared to near-monochrome but the tonal range within that spectrum is extraordinary. Spatial depth intensifies through gradations of light, pushing the eye beyond the action and into the abyss. The darkness of the sky is not emptiness but a living field; it holds mystery, weight, and temperature. The entire composition pivots on light’s capacity to define both time and truth—its revelation and its concealment. What is seen here is only half the story. What remains unseen is what gives it power.

Critics quickly recognized the change. “Mr. Remington has painted a number of night scenes, and in these he has made a great stride forward,” wrote New York Tribune art critic Royal Cortissoz of Remington’s 1907 exhibition at Knoedler’s. “It is not simply that he has changed his key. Study of the moonlights seems to have reacted upon the very grain of his art, so that all along the line, in drawing, in brushwork, in color, the atmosphere, he has achieved greater freedom and breadth.” (“Art Exhibitions,” New York Tribune, December 4, 1907) In An Argument with the Town Marshall, that freedom is palpable. The tension lies not only between the cowboy and his unseen opponent, but between Remington’s artistic past and the painter he was becoming.

The cultural resonance of such imagery would echo far beyond Remington’s lifetime. An Argument with the Town Marshall prefigures the visual vocabulary of the Western film: the solitary figure confronting invisible odds, the duel staged in a deserted street, the moral geometry of light and dark. Decades later, High Noon and countless other films would replay this archetype, but its origins can be traced to Remington’s moonlit main street. He had distilled the essence of frontier conflict into a single suspended moment—the threshold between myth and modern narrative.

Through these late works, Remington cemented his legacy. No longer the sportsman-illustrator of his youth, he became the architect of the great American epic, a vision of the West shaped by mood and myth. It was an idea that would outlive him, migrating from his canvases into the language of cinema and the broader imagination of the American century—and, in the process, securing his place within the canon of American art. As Western art curator Peter H. Hassrick observed of this final decade, Remington no longer wanted “his audience [to] view him as a sportsman, cowboy, or companion of the soldier. He felt himself complete as an American historical artist and a practitioner of painterly gesture.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, p. 134)

When Remington unexpectedly died in 1909 at the age of 48, he was among the most beloved artists in America. To his public, he remained the chronicler the West, the painter who had given visual form to the frontier’s final chapter. Yet those who looked closely saw something more radical: a painter who had turned inward, using light and atmosphere to express the immaterial. “Had he lived longer,” Hassrick reflected, “light and mystery and mankind would have continued to flow forth from his facile brush and uncommon genius.” (Frederic Remington, A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings, Cody, Wyoming, 1996, p. 167) In the nocturnes—An Argument with the Town Marshall chief among them—Remington found his true subject, not the West as place, but the West as idea, receding into the luminous haze of memory.