Frederic Remington

His maternal family, of French Basque ancestry, came to America in the early 1600s and founded Windsor, Connecticut.

Remington's father was a Union army colonel in the American Civil War, whose family had arrived in America from England in 1637.

He was a newspaper editor and postmaster, and the staunchly Republican family was active in local politics.

The Remingtons were horsemen.

One of Remington's great-grandfathers, Samuel Bascom, was a saddle maker by trade.

Remington's ancestors also fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812.

Remington was a cousin of Eliphalet Remington, founder of the Remington Arms Company, which is considered America's oldest gunmaker.

He was also related to three famous mountain men: Jedediah Smith, Jonathan T. Warner, and Robert "Doc" Newell.

Through the Warner side of his family, Remington was related to George Washington, the first US president.

Colonel Remington was away at war during most of the first four years of his son's life.

Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in the genre of Western American Art.

Remington was born in Canton, New York, in 1861 to Seth Pierrepont Remington (1830–1880) and Clarissa (Clara) Bascom Sackrider (1836–1912).

After the war, he moved his family to Bloomington, Illinois for a brief time and was appointed editor of the Bloomington Republican, but the family returned to Canton in 1867.

Remington was the only child of the marriage, and received constant attention and approval.

He was an Active Child, large and strong for his age, who loved to hunt, swim, ride, and go camping.

He was a poor student though, particularly in math, which did not bode well for his father's ambitions for his son to attend West Point.

He began to make drawings and sketches of soldiers and cowboys at an early age.

The family moved to Ogdensburg, New York when Remington was eleven and he attended Vermont Episcopal Institute, a church-run military school, where his father hoped discipline would rein in his son's lack of focus and perhaps lead to a military career.

Remington took his first drawing lessons at the Institute.

He then transferred to another military school where his classmates found the young Remington to be a pleasant fellow, a bit careless and lazy, good-humored, and generous of spirit but definitely not soldier material.

He enjoyed making caricatures and silhouettes of his classmates.

At 17, he wrote to his uncle of his modest ambitions, "I never intend to do any great amount of labor. I have but one short life and do not aspire to wealth or fame in a degree which could only be obtained by an extraordinary effort on my part."

He imagined a career for himself as a journalist, with art as a sideline.

Remington attended the art school at Yale University and studied under John Henry Niemeyer.

Remington was the only male student in his first year.

He found that football and boxing were more interesting than the formal art training, particularly drawing from casts and still life objects.

He preferred action drawing and his first published illustration was a cartoon of a "bandaged football player" for the student newspaper, Yale Courant.

Though he was not a star player, his participation on the strong Yale football team was a great source of pride for Remington and his family.

He left Yale in 1879 to tend to his ailing father, who had tuberculosis.

His father died a year later, at 50, receiving respectful recognition from the citizens of Ogdensburg.

Remington's Uncle Mart secured a good-paying clerical job for his nephew in Albany, New York, and Remington would return home on weekends to see his girlfriend Eva Caten.

After the rejection of his engagement proposal to Eva by her father, Remington became a reporter for his uncle's newspaper and went on to other short-lived jobs.

Living off his inheritance and modest work income, Remington refused to go back to art school and instead spent time camping and enjoying himself.

At 19, he made his first trip west, going to Montana, at first to buy a cattle operation and then a mining interest, but realized that he did not have sufficient capital for either.

In the American West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the quickly shrinking bison herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major confrontations of US Cavalry and Native American tribes, scenes he had imagined since his childhood.

He also hunted grizzly bears with Montague Stevens in New Mexico in 1895.

Though the trip was undertaken as a lark, it gave Remington a more authentic view of the West than some of the later artists and writers who followed in his footsteps, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey, who arrived twenty-five years later when much of the mythic West had already slipped into history.

From that first trip, Harper's Weekly printed Remington's first published commercial effort, a re-drawing of a quick sketch on wrapping paper that he had mailed back east.

His paternal family owned hardware stores and emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine in the early 18th century.

His works are known for depicting the Western United States in the last quarter of the 19th century and featuring such images as cowboys, American Indians, and the US Cavalry.