202 Indian Soldier

SOLD
Winning Bid Undisclosed
This item SOLD at 2016 Apr 02 @ 13:59UTC-7 : PDT/MST
Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 25,000.00 USD
Estimated at 50,000.00 - 75,000.00 USD
Indian Soldier
Artist: Remington, FredericDate of Birth: 1861-1909
Medium: Ink & Wash
Dimensions: 22 x 16 inches
Signed: Signed lower right
Verso:

Indian Soldier, done expressly for Remington’s 1897 book, Drawings by Frederic Remington, splendidly underscores the artist’s move away from strict illustration toward an art that is more suggestive, spare, and existential. With incredible economy, through careful attention to the shadow of the rider and horse and the distant, sketched-in landscape, Remington communicates the heat of the day and the essential loneliness of the scene. The soldier, a Native American—probably Apache—is caught between two worlds, between his past—his culture, heritage, upbringing, native soil—and his future—as an scout, and American in the United States Army, fighting, perhaps, against other Native Americans. With his hand shading the sun as he looks into the distance, all he, and Remington—and we—can say is that what lies ahead is, as yet, uncertain and unclear. This, in turn, refers back to the artist’s own uncertainty about the tectonic changes taking place in the West at the end of the 19th century, and where those changes would leave him. From what seems, on the surface, to be a straightforward piece of portraiture, Frederic Remington wrings a great deal of significance.
An early edition of Drawings by Frederic Remington and an 1898 R. H. Russell calendar featuring the work on the cover will be available for sale to the purchaser of this lot.