Artist: Frederic Remington
Title: The Broncho Buster
Medium: Bronze, Lifetime cast No. 56.
Dimensions: 23 1/4 inches high
Signed: Signed
Verso: ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N.Y.
Framed/Base: 23.25 x 22.5 x 11.75 inches - 41 lbs.
This lot's overall appearance is Excellent. For more details please view the attached Condition Report.
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Provenance:
Private collection
Altermann & Morris Galleries, Houston, TX, 1993
Regina Giesecke Collection, Ballinger, Texas
Sold by decent in family partnership, Scottsdale, Arizona
It is without overstatement or hyperbole to say that Frederic Remington’s bronze The Broncho Buster is a singular force in American art. The sculpture, Remington’s first bronze, has remained a part of American culture for generations. It has appeared behind numerous American presidents in the Oval Office. It remains an important part of many museum collections, with some institutions having several versions. And casts of it still appear on desks, mantles and shelves in movies and television, frequently to invoke themes of tradition, ruggedness, grit, determination and American resolve. The Broncho Buster is not only one of the most iconic pieces of Western art, it may also be one of the most ubiquitous pieces of American art ever created.
This edition by Roman Bronze Works is cast No. 56, which is listed in the foundry’s ledger as completed on July 30, 1906, which puts it within Remington’s lifetime. (Henry-Bonnard Bronze Co. produced 64 largely identical sand castings from 1895 to 1900, after which Roman Bronze Works produced more than 270 lost-wax casts.) Roman Bronze Works casts were notable for being tweaked periodically by the artist and the foundry. This cast has one notable and sought-after feature, which is the horse’s free-flowing tail. Later casts attached the tail to the horse’s right hind leg, which was likely changed to prevent breaks during production. In addition to the unattached tail, this cast also has unique and sharp detail in the face and hat, a holstered gun and belt that pulls away from the rider’s body, and a well-defined set of stirrups. Casts numbered less than 60 are also considered (at least by many) to be of a higher quality compared to later, posthumous casts.
“Sculpture was new to Remington when he produced The Broncho Buster, but his success with the medium was immediate,” writes Peter Hassrick in Frederic Remington. “The critic Arthur Hoeber recognized that the bronze represented an important new direction for Remington and for the history of American sculpture. ‘Now...the energy and restlessness that actuated the work of Mr. Remington have found another vent, and the transition is not altogether surprising or unexpected. Breaking away from the narrow limits and restraints of pen and ink on flat surface, Remington has stampeded, as it were, to the greater possibilities of plastic form in clay, and in a single experiment has demonstrated his ability adequately to convey his ideas in a new and more effective medium of expression.’”
In The American West in Bronze, the 2013 catalog for the exhibition with the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hassrick continued to bestow the bronze with the highest of praise. He called upon an older Remington painting, The Fall of the Cowboy, which shows a rider off his horse opening a fence—“an unhorsed cowboy was an emasculated figure.” That was one story, but The Broncho Buster was a different one, he argued. “In this contest between man and nature, man is positioned to win, with the cowboy virtually guaranteed to stay in the saddle. When the artist wrote to [writer Owen] Wister about it that ‘I am to endure in bronze,’ he was implying that the cowboy would endure as well.”
