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拍品專文
In the 1890s, Frederic Remington was still chasing what he referred to as “our modern notion of fidelity—naturalism.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, New York, 1988, p. 108) His art prized accuracy over atmosphere: every hoof, shadow, and strap rendered with military precision. As Monet fractured sunlight into color and Sargent dissolved his subjects into gesture, Remington held fast to the hard realities of the American frontier. Conceived after his time with the 10th Cavalry in Arizona, Right Front Into Line—Come On! (1891) was a study in control, a grand, carefully organized charge that left little room for air. But when the painting failed to capture the attention of the establishment, he turned back to the canvas. When Remington reconfigured the canvas to focus on The Trooper, the change was more than compositional. The cavalryman remained, but the clatter fell away. In its place emerged light, surface, and a new confidence with paint, the first glimpse of the Remington who would soon begin to look beyond description to sensation.
At this moment in his career, Remington was negotiating the boundary between illustrator and painter. His reputation had been built through the pages of Harper’s Weekly, Century Magazine, and Scribner’s, where his exacting depictions of the West had defined the public’s imagination of it. Yet the very qualities that made his images so compelling in print—clarity, action, legibility—worked against him in the gallery. Critics struggled to see beyond the narrative to the painting itself. The Trooper quietly challenges that reading. Though born from a picture conceived for mass appeal, it marked Remington’s first step toward painterly independence.
Now known only through a photograph taken in William Kurtz’s New York studio, Right Front into Line—Come On! was among Remington’s most ambitious early paintings. The large-scale horizontal composition assembled a full company of troopers surging forward across the plain. In a letter to his friend Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, written in June 1891, Remington confessed both the scale of his undertaking and his uncertainty: “I am doing a big painting and I ain’t sure of my tactics,” he wrote. “You see they are coming like hell, and I want to get the title Right Front into Line, Come On! The ‘come on’ is all in the expression of the officer and the bugler is blowing the charge.… The men are large on the right and trotting while as they go away, they begin to go faster and faster until on the far left they are turning double back handsprings—now is this right?” (Letter to Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, June 20, 1891)
His correspondence with Clarke, an officer of the 10th Cavalry whom Remington had met during his Arizona expeditions in the late 1880s, offered a sounding board for such pictorial strategies. Clarke’s firsthand knowledge of cavalry tactics and frontier campaigns provided the technical grounding Remington craved. Their letters reveal Remington’s determination to “get his tactics right,” to translate the precision of drill and the heat of pursuit not only into his paintings but into his prose. Even in jest, Remington’s phrasing captured the desire to fuse authenticity with drama.
The painting commanded such attention that Remington chose to debut it at the National Academy’s Autumn Exhibition later that year, pricing it at $5,000—five times more than he had ever asked for a picture. Yet the critics were unmoved. When Right Front into Line—Come On! reappeared at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1892, its reception was eclipsed by a small group of Impressionist canvases by Monet. The Philadelphia Inquirer, granting Remington only faint praise, deemed his cavalry scene “excellent in drawing, but more fitted for illustration or mural decoration.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, p. 113) To be overshadowed by Monet was, for Remington, an unsettling reminder that his brand of exacting realism no longer defined the modern eye.
The rejection sparked a reckoning. When the unsold painting was returned to his studio, Remington began to cut it down, eliminating two-thirds of the canvas. The horizon was lowered, the peripheral figures erased or repainted as distant riders. What remained was a lone cavalryman—a mounted officer charging head-on, his pistol lifted in command. Beneath him, his horse galloping at full stretch, hooves tearing through the earth. The composition contracts into pure momentum: man and horse fused in motion and command. From Right Front into Line—Come On! emerged The Trooper, a work of remarkable restraint and self-revision.
“Big Art,” Remington observed in 1903, “is the process of elimination, cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, p. 134) The Trooper offers an early expression of the credo that would guide his final decade. The sky is brightened and subtly modulated, its tones shifting with a new sensitivity to light, while in the background the earth loosens into visible strokes. Where his earlier composition surged with collective energy, here motion is arrested and transformed into psychological presence. The cavalry charge dissolves into the idea of the cavalryman: a solitary emblem of discipline, courage, and resolve.
The trooper himself was a figure Remington had known intimately since his time spent observing the 10th Cavalry. Stationed at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory, he had accompanied the unit on a grueling two-week reconnaissance through the mountains, observing firsthand the routines and hardships of frontier service. These men embodied the discipline of the military and the endurance of the Western frontier. Through them, Remington traced a personal lineage: his father had been a colonel in the Civil War, and the mounted soldier represented a continuity of valor from the battlefields of Virginia to the deserts of Arizona.
While the heroes of the West supplied Remington with his narratives of duty and endurance, their horses provided his language of strength, vitality, and companionship. Long before his Western journeys he had been captivated by horses and they remained the constant thread through every phase of his career. As B. Byron Price observes, “Horses were artist Frederic Remington’s lifelong passion… the most celebrated and prolific American equine and equestrian artist of his day, Remington considered the oft-repeated adage ‘he knew the horse’ a worthy epitaph.” (Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II, Norman, Oklahoma, 2016, p. 103) Remington recorded every breed and explored the horse’s anatomy and temperament across drawing, paint, and bronze. His renderings of equine motion and character set a new standard in American art, one against which others of his generation were measured.
For Remington, the horse was more than a subject, it was a measure of structure, motion, and spirit. Through it, he tested his control as a draftsman and his sensitivity as a painter, balancing anatomy with expression, and power with poise. He studied its form obsessively and drew on Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies to refine his understanding of motion. Yet even at his most precise, Remington’s horses were never mechanical. In The Trooper, the horse drives headlong into motion, its muscles taut, nostrils flared, and mouth strained against the bit, its exertion rendered with the accuracy of lived experience.
In the years that followed, Remington would continue to refine this balance between fidelity and feeling. The Trooper stands at that pivotal juncture—bridging the illustrator’s precision and the painter’s freedom, the spectacle of the frontier and the solitude of the studio. What began as an exercise in accuracy became an act of distillation: a single figure carrying the weight of an entire mythology. Through the lone rider and his horse, Remington condensed the energy of the West into something quieter but more enduring—an image not of battle but of command, of mastery held in check. In paring away the narrative, he found his truest subject: the tension between motion and control, realism and imagination, through which his mature art would emerge.
At this moment in his career, Remington was negotiating the boundary between illustrator and painter. His reputation had been built through the pages of Harper’s Weekly, Century Magazine, and Scribner’s, where his exacting depictions of the West had defined the public’s imagination of it. Yet the very qualities that made his images so compelling in print—clarity, action, legibility—worked against him in the gallery. Critics struggled to see beyond the narrative to the painting itself. The Trooper quietly challenges that reading. Though born from a picture conceived for mass appeal, it marked Remington’s first step toward painterly independence.
Now known only through a photograph taken in William Kurtz’s New York studio, Right Front into Line—Come On! was among Remington’s most ambitious early paintings. The large-scale horizontal composition assembled a full company of troopers surging forward across the plain. In a letter to his friend Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, written in June 1891, Remington confessed both the scale of his undertaking and his uncertainty: “I am doing a big painting and I ain’t sure of my tactics,” he wrote. “You see they are coming like hell, and I want to get the title Right Front into Line, Come On! The ‘come on’ is all in the expression of the officer and the bugler is blowing the charge.… The men are large on the right and trotting while as they go away, they begin to go faster and faster until on the far left they are turning double back handsprings—now is this right?” (Letter to Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke, June 20, 1891)
His correspondence with Clarke, an officer of the 10th Cavalry whom Remington had met during his Arizona expeditions in the late 1880s, offered a sounding board for such pictorial strategies. Clarke’s firsthand knowledge of cavalry tactics and frontier campaigns provided the technical grounding Remington craved. Their letters reveal Remington’s determination to “get his tactics right,” to translate the precision of drill and the heat of pursuit not only into his paintings but into his prose. Even in jest, Remington’s phrasing captured the desire to fuse authenticity with drama.
The painting commanded such attention that Remington chose to debut it at the National Academy’s Autumn Exhibition later that year, pricing it at $5,000—five times more than he had ever asked for a picture. Yet the critics were unmoved. When Right Front into Line—Come On! reappeared at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1892, its reception was eclipsed by a small group of Impressionist canvases by Monet. The Philadelphia Inquirer, granting Remington only faint praise, deemed his cavalry scene “excellent in drawing, but more fitted for illustration or mural decoration.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, p. 113) To be overshadowed by Monet was, for Remington, an unsettling reminder that his brand of exacting realism no longer defined the modern eye.
The rejection sparked a reckoning. When the unsold painting was returned to his studio, Remington began to cut it down, eliminating two-thirds of the canvas. The horizon was lowered, the peripheral figures erased or repainted as distant riders. What remained was a lone cavalryman—a mounted officer charging head-on, his pistol lifted in command. Beneath him, his horse galloping at full stretch, hooves tearing through the earth. The composition contracts into pure momentum: man and horse fused in motion and command. From Right Front into Line—Come On! emerged The Trooper, a work of remarkable restraint and self-revision.
“Big Art,” Remington observed in 1903, “is the process of elimination, cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.” (Frederic Remington: The Masterworks, p. 134) The Trooper offers an early expression of the credo that would guide his final decade. The sky is brightened and subtly modulated, its tones shifting with a new sensitivity to light, while in the background the earth loosens into visible strokes. Where his earlier composition surged with collective energy, here motion is arrested and transformed into psychological presence. The cavalry charge dissolves into the idea of the cavalryman: a solitary emblem of discipline, courage, and resolve.
The trooper himself was a figure Remington had known intimately since his time spent observing the 10th Cavalry. Stationed at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory, he had accompanied the unit on a grueling two-week reconnaissance through the mountains, observing firsthand the routines and hardships of frontier service. These men embodied the discipline of the military and the endurance of the Western frontier. Through them, Remington traced a personal lineage: his father had been a colonel in the Civil War, and the mounted soldier represented a continuity of valor from the battlefields of Virginia to the deserts of Arizona.
While the heroes of the West supplied Remington with his narratives of duty and endurance, their horses provided his language of strength, vitality, and companionship. Long before his Western journeys he had been captivated by horses and they remained the constant thread through every phase of his career. As B. Byron Price observes, “Horses were artist Frederic Remington’s lifelong passion… the most celebrated and prolific American equine and equestrian artist of his day, Remington considered the oft-repeated adage ‘he knew the horse’ a worthy epitaph.” (Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II, Norman, Oklahoma, 2016, p. 103) Remington recorded every breed and explored the horse’s anatomy and temperament across drawing, paint, and bronze. His renderings of equine motion and character set a new standard in American art, one against which others of his generation were measured.
For Remington, the horse was more than a subject, it was a measure of structure, motion, and spirit. Through it, he tested his control as a draftsman and his sensitivity as a painter, balancing anatomy with expression, and power with poise. He studied its form obsessively and drew on Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion studies to refine his understanding of motion. Yet even at his most precise, Remington’s horses were never mechanical. In The Trooper, the horse drives headlong into motion, its muscles taut, nostrils flared, and mouth strained against the bit, its exertion rendered with the accuracy of lived experience.
In the years that followed, Remington would continue to refine this balance between fidelity and feeling. The Trooper stands at that pivotal juncture—bridging the illustrator’s precision and the painter’s freedom, the spectacle of the frontier and the solitude of the studio. What began as an exercise in accuracy became an act of distillation: a single figure carrying the weight of an entire mythology. Through the lone rider and his horse, Remington condensed the energy of the West into something quieter but more enduring—an image not of battle but of command, of mastery held in check. In paring away the narrative, he found his truest subject: the tension between motion and control, realism and imagination, through which his mature art would emerge.