Coming to the Call

Perhaps more than any work of his final decade, Coming to the Call announces a decisive shift in Frederic Remington’s art, aligning him with the emerging concerns of modern painting. Across Europe and the United States, artists were loosening form, pursuing tonal harmonies, and treating light and atmosphere as expressive subjects in their own right. Remington, too, began to move beyond narrative description toward a more atmospheric and reduced vocabulary. The change was palpable, pushing him almost immediately away from the illustrator he had been toward the painter he had long aspired to be. A 1907 issue of Current Literature praised the new direction, referring to the present painting as “a painting as remarkable, in the original, for its simplicity as for its rich and haunting color-effect.” (Current Literature, New York, November 1907, p. 524)

Royal Cortissoz, the New York Tribune’s influential art critic, captured the magnitude of Remington’s stride: “I don’t know any better sensation than that of looking on while a fellow human is making one splendid stride after another, painting good pictures and these damn good ones, and then damneder, and all the time doing it to his own beat, being himself in the fullest sense, making something beautiful that no one else could make.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, New York, 1988, pp. 134–35) As Western art curator Peter H. Hassrick later noted, Cortissoz’s words might well have been directly prompted by Coming to the Call or its companion, Evening on a Canadian Lake (1905, American Museum of Western Art, Denver, Colorado).

When Coming to the Call appeared as a double-page spread in Collier’s Weekly on August 19, 1905, readers also sensed a change in the artist’s tone. Two years earlier, he had signed an exclusive contract with the magazine that paid him handsomely to produce 12 paintings a year, while allowing him to retain the originals for exhibition and sale—coincidentally, Coming to the Call was purchased for $500 by Robert J. Collier, son of the magazine’s founder and its future editor and publisher. With its national reach and circulation climbing toward half a million, the pages of Collier’s became his most visible platform. The magazine also marketed color reproductions of his paintings, affordable prints that brought his imagery into homes across the country.

A 1906 advertisement captured the enthusiasm: “Beautiful outdoor pictures by Remington, $1.50 each. Coming to the Call and An Evening on a Canadian Lake are the two most beautiful and popular pictures ever drawn by Frederic Remington—the ablest out-of-doors artist of our time.” (Collier’s Weekly, July 21, 1906, p. 23) A few years later, Collier’s offered the image again, packaged with Evening on a Canadian Lake, Fight for the Waterhole, and His First Lesson in a portfolio known as “Remington’s Four Best Paintings,” evidence of just how eagerly his audience embraced his quieter, more tonal vision.

This new restraint mirrored Remington’s own changing sense of purpose. “It seems as if I must paint them [sunsets],” he told journalist Edwin Wildman in 1902, “as if they’d never be so beautiful again. But people won’t stand for my painting sunsets. They’ve got me pigeonholed in their minds, you see—cowboys, Indians, horses, the military.” (In the Remington Moment, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2010, p. 65) For nearly two decades he had supplied the public with scenes of masculine action: the gallop of cavalry, the peril of the scout, the charge through dust and gunfire. By the turn of the century, that world had begun to fade. Writing to his wife from Santa Fe in 1900, he confessed, “Shall never come West again—it is all brick buildings—derby hats and blue overhauls [sic]—it spoils my early illusions—and they are my capital.” (Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, Princeton, New Jersey, 2003, p. 19) Now the mythic frontier that had once energized him had given way to progress, prompting a more introspective understanding of the region’s place in his work.

In the summer of 1905, Remington moved his easel to Ingleneuk, the island retreat he purchased in 1890 on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River, where he likely painted Coming to the Call. For him, Ingleneuk represented the last remnant of “old America,” a landscape still rich with mystery and the promise of discovery. There, summer after summer, he paddled his Rushton canoe at twilight, studying the play of light across the water and making color notes that would guide his studio work. These observations shaped the canvases of his final decade, paintings suffused with moonlight, reflection, and tonal ambiguity. Though many of his nocturnes revisited Western subjects, he carried the mood of the river with him, the coolness of the atmosphere and the long fade of twilight.

In the untamed wilderness of Coming to the Call a solitary moose stands at the water’s edge, its dark mass mirrored in the river’s glassy surface. At first, the scene reads as a study in calm. Only gradually does the eye register the shadowed canoe drifting against the dark rushes of the bank, its rim catching the last glint of light, and the figure within it, poised with his rifle raised. The stillness is deceptive. In this moment before sound, drama unfolds through silence and suspense.

That Remington chose a moose hunt as the armature for Coming to the Call was no accident. The theme carried both personal and professional resonance. Though Remington often styled himself as an “urbane sportsman,” befriending conservation leaders and at times casting himself in his writing and art as a heroic hunter, his relationship to the hunt was more complex. In an October 1890 article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, writer Julian Ralph recalled how, one winter evening, Remington had persuaded the gun-shy journalist to join him on a Canadian moose hunt. In his story, Ralph described Remington as “a famous hunter—a genuine, devoted hunter—and one might almost as safely speak a light word of his relations as of his favorite mode of recreation.” (Frederic Remington Catalogue Raisonné, Norman, Oklahoma, 2016, p. 77) The resulting article helped shape the public image of Remington, the cowboy artist, as a devoted sportsman and outdoor enthusiast.

Beneath its calm surface runs a current that had long coursed through Remington’s art — an awareness of life lived in proximity to death. From his frontier battles to his nocturnes, mortality remained his most persistent subject. In December 1909, the year of his own death, he pasted a newspaper clipping into his diary quoting an unnamed reviewer: “Indeed, in all of Remington’s pictures the shadow of death seems not far away. If the actors in his vivid scenes are not threatened by death in terrible combat, they are menaced by it in the form of famine, thirst, or cold. … Even about his animals there is a strong suggestion of the nearness of the moment when their bones will lie bleaching on the desert.” (Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, p. 64) Coming to the Call visualizes that awareness with unnerving calm. The hunter’s aim and the moose’s stillness form a meditation on mortality itself — nature’s beauty poised against its brutality.

In the stillness of Coming to the Call, Remington distilled a lifetime of observation into something elemental. The painting unites his technical daring with his deepening introspection, transforming motion into atmosphere and action into reflection. What begins as a scene of hunter and prey becomes a meditation on balance — between beauty and danger, vitality and loss. In its restraint lies Remington’s late achievement: a vision of the world quieted, yet profoundly alive.