The Cheyenne

Additional Information

Roaming, camping, fishing—this was young Frederic Remington’s idea of life. Having left the Yale College of Art after only three semesters, Remington bounced from job to job, drifting west into the Kansas Territory, getting involved in get rich quick schemes that ranged from sheep to saloons. Remington’s first western folly taught him something: caricatures and sketches could become paintings, paintings that people would buy, and so he went east, enrolled in the Art Students’ League of New York and soon began selling scenes of western life to Harper’s magazine and other periodicals hungering for stories and images of the “Wild West.” By the mid 1890’s, Remington was America’s premier illustrator of the American West, one of the architects of the myth of the cowboy. In 1895, he turned his attention to sculpture creating iconic bronzes like The Bronco Buster and The Cheyenne that would established him as one of the nation’s most important sculptors. One of the two bronzes by the artist—the other is The Bronco Buster—that flank the desk in the Oval Office, The Cheyenne is a study in speed and power. All the movement is forward as the Cheyenne brave leans over and into his charging mount. It’s an interesting contrast with The Bronco Buster, which is all vertical and wheeling motion. Taken together, they represent three dimensions in space, and the fourth—time—as Remington strives, and struggles, to apprehend in each a single moment in fluid, rapidly changing time.

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