Thrust His Lance Through the Body and Rode Him Down

Additional Information

Literature:
Harper’s Weekly, Harper & Brothers, New York, NY, December 7, 1889: p. 980.
Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonne, Volume I, Peter H. Hassrick and Melissa J. Webster, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, WY: p. 199.
Frederic Remington: The American West, Philip R. St. Clair, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, 1978: p. 239.

Provenance:
Sold by the artist to William E. Booth, Toronto, Canada
Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, NY
Harrison Eiteljorg, Indianapolis, IN, 1970
Gifted to private collector, 1973
Christie’s, New York, NY, 2010

Created during an especially active period of Frederic Remington’s illustration career, Thrust His Lance Through the Body and Rode Him Down was painted for the December 7, 1889, edition of Harper’s Weekly. A woodcut engraving of the image appeared on a full page, accompanying Clarence Pullen’s story “Christmas at the Hacienda,” which tells the story of Don Francisco as he greets holiday guests at a mission near the Rio Grande when New Mexico was part Mexico. During the festivities, a band of Navajo warriors attacks the mission and Don Francisco is struck down in the battle. Cullen writes:

“Don Francisco lay pressed to the ground beneath the dead body of a pony, and a Navajo warrior was rushing upon him with a war club raised. There was no help near. Every one of his men had his hands full elsewhere. His pistols were empty, his sword useless. It seemed that his time had come, and he resigned himself to death. Then, above all other sounds, he heard the warwhoop of the Comanches and the trampling of their horses. A young warrior, brightly painted and leading all the rest, whipped his horse upon the Navajo, thrust his lance through his body, and rode him down. Before the don could realize that he was saved, the wild troop of Comanches had engaged the Navajos, drove them back, and the fight had gone beyond him. The Navajo, a mountain Indian and good fighter on his own domain, is on open land no match for the Comanches, who are the best horsemen among the Indian tribes. They made but a moment’s stand, and then scattered to gain the cover of the rocky foot-hills. The Comanches did not care to follow them into these their chosen fighting-grounds, and rode back to despatch the wounded and scalp the dead.”

The image, documented as No. 550 in the Remington catalogue raisonné, was part of a string of black-and-white paintings from the late 1880s the artist created for magazines such as Harper’s, St. Nicholas Magazine, Century Magazine, Scribner’s and many others. Although Remington was known for his masterpieces outside of illustration, it’s these pieces for popular magazines that define his work and establish him as an important painter of the American West. Peter Hassrick, one of the great scholars of Remington and his work, did not easily brush aside the illustration side of the great artist’s career. In fact, he lauded it and marveled at its importance to the later work Remington produced. “Remington’s renown as an illustrator is unquestioned. He was active during the golden age of American illustration, a field then ‘accepted as fine art in America. This may be accounted for,’ Barbara Rose explains, ‘by the egalitarian nature of our society, with its fixed traditions and its constant demands for an art that can be understood by the majority,’” Hassrick writes in Frederic Remington: The American West. “Although Remington left the field of illustration for painting and sculpture, he firmly believed in the importance of his beginning work. ‘To be a successful illustrator,’ he once wrote, ‘is to be fully as much of a man as to be a successful painter.’”

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