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Featured in our current exhibit, Remington and Russell in Black and White, is a drawing of a seemingly unusual sight: a soldier jumping on to a horse! This drawing is one of three images of horse acrobatics featured in an 1898 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article, “The Essentials at Fort Adobe,” written and illustrated by Remington. The Fort Adobe he refers to in the article is actually Fort Robinson, a military post in Nebraska established in the early 1870s. Remington’s title was likely drawn from the adobe barracks that were built in 1887 to house the officers stationed there.   [...]

Our current exhibition, Remington and Russell in Black in White, examines both artists’ careers in illustration at the turn of the 20th century. Many of the artworks featured in the show are painted in grisaille, which is an art term for grayscale. These black and white works specifically functioned as the source for reproduction in books and magazines of Remington and Russell’s day. Both artists were very deliberate in how and why they were making these artworks to help tell the story of the American West as they imagined it. Let’s first take a closer look at Remington’s illustration career. [...]

During his time as a regular illustrator, apart from his documentation of the American Indian Wars and the Spanish American War, Frederic Remington was often sent out on assignment to capture the daily routines of the cavalry. In 1893, he traveled out west to Yellowstone National Park to write and illustrate an article about the 6th Cavalry patrols in the park to prevent poaching, including the dwindling bison herd that was supposed to be protected there.   “Policing the Yellowstone,” Frederic Remington, Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1895   Remington’s article appeared in the January 12, 1895 issue of [...]

The Golden Age of American illustration wasn’t limited to popular periodicals of the era. Charles Russell and Frederic Remington also contributed illustrations for different book projects. In 1902, Remington painted Days on the Range to serve as the frontispiece for Alfred Henry Lewis’s book Wolfville Days. The scene portrayed in Remington’s canvas relates to the 19th chapter in the book, “When the Stage was Stopped.” In this last section of the book, the narrator describes a long-winded tale about stagecoach robberies and holdups. In the story, the townspeople of Wolfville devise a scheme to trick one of the suspected bandits, [...]

The Golden Age of American Illustration began in the 1880s and lasted into the mid-twentieth century. During this time, New York replaced London as the center of illustrated periodicals published in the English language. Technological advances allowed for inexpensive yet high quality images to be reproduced easily and distributed to a wide audience through magazines like the popular Harper’s Magazine, Century Magazine, and Collier’s. And Frederic Remington and Charles Russell were on hand to contribute their art! Remington’s first commercial illustration appeared in an 1882 issue of Harper’s Weekly, and just a handful of years later, Russell’s first illustration was [...]