Frederic Remington Major Exhibition AT Fenimore Art Museum

Thursday, 30 August 2007 02:04

COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK—Fenimore Art Museum is exhibiting more than 20 original paintings and drawings, and four original sculptures by famed Western painter and illustrator Frederic Remington (1861-1909). Culled from one of the finest Remington collections in the world, The Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, Treasures from the Frederic Remington Art Museum, showcases not only the breadth of the artist’s work, but also the extensive Remington holdings of the art museum. This major traveling exhibition will be on view through September 4th.

The exhibition highlights the comprehensive collection of the Frederic Remington Art Museum with the showcase of the artist’s best-known and significant works, including an 1885 watercolor, Sunday Morning Toilet on the Ranch, which is a fine example of Remington’s early devotion to the theme of cowboy ritual and camaraderie. The exhibition also features examples of many of Remington’s illustrations, including the 1888 oil on board One of the Boys, one of many works he produced for an important early commission to illustrate six stories of Theodore Roosevelt’s western exploits in The Century. Remington is also known for his bronzes, of which four original sculptures will be featured in the exhibition, including a fine, early example of The Broncho Buster, 1895.

Regarded as a chronicler of the American West, Frederic Remington was a multitalented artist who made a name for himself as an illustrator of Western and military subjects for many of the widely circulated magazines of the late 1880s and 1890s including Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, Century, Collier’s, Outing, Boys’ Life, and Cosmopolitan. Although highly associated with the American West, Remington spent most of his life on the east and resided in New Rochelle, New York. Born in Canton, New York, in 1861, Remington briefly attended the School of Fine Arts at Yale before traveling in the west, then beginning work as an illustrator. As a young man, he traveled widely, sketching the people and places of the new American frontier. By the mid-1880s, Remington became one of the most popular and successful illustrators of the age. Remington also found success as a writer, painter, and sculptor. In Remington’s forty-eight years, he produced over 3,000-signed paintings and drawings, 22 bronze sculptures, and wrote articles and novels that comprised eight books.

The exhibition, Treasures from the Frederic Remington Art Museum, was curated and organized by Laura T. Foster of The Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, NY. The exhibition will be touring nationally.

About the Frederic Remington Art Museum

Founded by the estate of Frederic Remington's widow, Eva, the museum has been open since 1923. Open year-round, the museum exhibits Remington masterpieces in oil, many bronze sculptures, scores of works on paper, and many of the artist's working tools and the sketches and photographs that were his inspiration. Fittingly, the museum enjoys a view of the St. Lawrence River, near Canton where he was born and buried, and near the northern woods and waters that were Remington's other frontier. The museum is 2.5 hours north of Syracuse and online at www.fredericremington.org

About Fenimore Art Museum
One of the nation’s premier art institutions, the Fenimore Art Museum is home to an exceptionally rich collection of American folk art and American Indian art as well as important holdings in American decorative arts, photography, and twentieth-century art. Founded in 1945 in Cooperstown, New York, the museum is part of the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA), founded in 1899. The museum’s renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection, housed in the American Indian Wing, is a masterpiece collection of more than 800 art objects, representing a broad scope of North American cultures. The collections of folk and American art include seminal works by Grandma Moses, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole, William Sidney Mount, Benjamin West, and John H. I. Browere. The museum further explores and examines our cultural history by organizing and hosting nationally touring art and history exhibitions, including Grandma Moses: Grandmother to the Nation; Treasures from Olana: The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church; A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr.; Winslow Homer: Masterworks from the Adirondacks; and Ralph Fasanella’s America.

The Fenimore Art Museum is located on 5798 State Hwy. 80, Lake Road, in Cooperstown. The museum’s Fenimore Café, overlooking beautiful Otsego Lake, features wonderful views and a tranquil setting amid the terraced gardens. The museum is open from April 1 through December 30. For museum hours or general information, please call 1-888-547-1450 or visit www.fenimoreartmuseum.org .