Sid Richardson Museum presents "Night & Day: Frederic Remington's Final Decade"
Sid Richardson Museum presents "Stunning Saddle"
Sid Richardson Museum presents "Night & Day: Frederic Remington's Final Decade," which explores works made in the final decade of Remington’s life, when the artist alternated his canvases between the color dominant palettes of blue-green and yellow-orange. The works included range from 1900 to 1909, the year that Remington’s life was cut short by complications due to appendicitis at the young age of 48.
In these final years Remington was working to distance himself from his long-established reputation as an illustrator, to become accepted by the New York art world as a fine artist, as he embraced the painting style of the American Impressionists. In these late works he strove to revise his color palette, compositional structure, and brushwork as he set his Western subjects under an interchanging backdrop of the shadows of night and the dazzling light of day.
Throughout his career Remington revised and reworked compositions across media, from his illustrations to his oils to his three-dimensional bronzes. As part of this process of revision, Remington took extreme measures from 1907 to 1909 when, as part of his campaign toward changing the perception of his art, he destroyed well over 100 works that he felt did not satisfy his new standards of painting.
A contract made with Collier’s magazine that began in 1903 meant that many of the works he destroyed are preserved through halftone reproductions published by that journal. The inclusion of these images in this exhibition offers the opportunity to compare them with modified and remade compositions Remington produced in his final years.
The museum is extending the run of the exhibition to Sunday, April 30, to showcase a rare Remington watercolor titled Cold Day on Picket. The artwork was recently discovered by Museum Director Scott Winterrowd during a visit with Dallas collectors Duffy and Tina Oyster.