364 Bronco Buster

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2017 Apr 08 @ 15:14UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price NA
Estimated at 80,000.00 - 120,000.00 USD
Bronco Buster
Artist: Remington, FredericDate of Birth: 1861-1909
Medium: Bronze, cast number 177
Dimensions: 22 1/2 inches high
Signed: Roman Bronze Works N.Y.
Verso:

By 1893, Frederic Remington felt that the era of the cowboy was vanishing fast. Traveling to the Southwest and crossing into Mexico, he lighted on the San Jose de Bavicora ranch, situated in Apache country northwest of Chihuahua. America’s foremost illustrator of life in the West was searching for something that was slipping away, something that would take him back in time. Bavicora would point out the road that led from paint to wax and bronze. Bavicora would inspire his best known work—The Bronco Buster. Earlier, Remington had written in his notes: “[The cowboy] was a combination of the Kentucky or Tennessee man with the Spanish.” He would find this combination in “Patron Jack” Follamsbee, a man born into a Kentucky racehorse family who ended up wresting Bavicora from the Mexican wilderness while earning the loyalty of his vaqueros through sheer audacity. On his return to New York, a playwright friend visited Remington. Observing the artist’s skill at moving figures around in the picture plane, the playwright advised him that since he worked in three dimensions in his paintings, he should try his hand at sculpting. His imagination fired, Remington went to work, creating The Bronco Buster in sculptor’s wax. What remained was to find a foundry to cast the piece. The problem, according to Remington’s sculptor friends, was that the piece was so top heavy it would not stand. But Remington rejected this and sought help from two new arrivals in New York: the Henry Bonnard and Roman Bronze Works. The European artisans who ran these foundries employed techniques dating back to the Greeks, techniques that would allow The Bronco Buster to stand freely. Every image of the Oval Office in the White House features Theodore Roosevelt’s The Bronco Buster. Remington’s image of the rider trying to master the bucking bronc is the single most recognizable artistic conception of the American West.