Frederic Remington (1861-1909)
Feeding the Dogs (Hunting Musk Ox: Feed)
Medium: oil en grisaille on canvas
Dimensions: 22 x 20
Framed/base dimensions: 28 x 26 1/4 x 2 1/4
Signature: signed lower right: Frederic Remington

Provenance:

Ten Eyck Family, New York State
[Sale: Sotheby’s, May 30, 1985, lot 101]
Private collection, Florida, acquired directly from the above

Literature:
Caspar W. Whitney: “On Snow-Shoes to the Barren Grounds,” Part V, Harper’s Monthly, April 1896, p. 721, illus.
Harold McCracken: Frederic Remington, Artist of the Old West (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1947), p. 132
Peter H. Hassrick and Melissa J. Webster: Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II, (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1996), p. 572, no. 2030, illus.

Notes:
Born in 1861, in Canton, NY, Frederic Remington was the son of Seth Pierre Remington, a newspaper publisher, and Clara Sackrider Remington. He studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1878 – 1879, but following the death of his father in 1880, he did not return to school, opting instead to work as a reporter for the Albany Morning Express. Later that summer, he vacationed and sketched in the Montana Territory, one of which was published in the Harper’s Weekly of February 25, 1882. He continued to sketch during travels through the New Mexico and Arizona Territories as well as Texas over the next two years.

By 1887, Remington’s illustrations were regularly published in the various Harper’s publications (Bazaar, Monthly, Weekly, Young People) in addition to Scribner’s, Collier’s, and Century, among others. His works were exhibited widely: at The National Academy of Design, the American Watercolor Society, Boston Arts Club, the 1889 Paris International Exposition (he won the silver medal for his painting Last Lull in the Fight, now lost), the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He continued to travel extensively throughout the Western States and territories, Canada, and Mexico, with additional excursions to Florida, Cuba, Europe, and Algiers. Beginning in the 1880s, his travels included time at Crow and Blackfeet Indian reservations, the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma), the battlegrounds of Little Bighorn (July 1876) and Wounded Knee (December 1890), and Buffalo Bill Cody’s ranch in Wyoming. He made his last trip West in September of 1908 and died at his home in Ridgefield, CT in December 1909.

Remington’s work can be divided into several categories, and this current example belongs to the most prolific of Remington’s oeuvre: illustrations. In the late 1880s and 1890s, these were primarily done en grisaille for easy reproduction in publications. Feeding the Dogs belongs to the artist’s mature painting style, where the tightly rendered compositions of his earlier work had developed into more modeled figures and lively, fluid scenes. The circular arrangement of the figure and the four dogs in the foreground is repeated several times, two dogs and a figure are visible in the middle ground and three additional figures and their dogs are arranged around the lodge in the background. The piece of food suspended between the primary figure’s outstretched arm and the two dogs leaping towards it and the raised whip of one of the other men convey a sense of action within the scene.

In December 1895, Harper’s Monthly began publishing Caspar W. Whitney’s “On Snow-Shoes to the Barren Grounds.” The article spanned five issues, all accompanied by illustrations. Three main illustrations by Remington were included in each issue, the current example is the penultimate work for the end of the story. Whitney’s story describes his adventure to hunt in the Barren Grounds (or Barren Lands), an approximately 200,000-square-mile-area in northern Canada. The tundra region is nearly uninhabited and, at the time, accessible only by canoe during the summer months and by sled and snowshoe the rest of the year. The latter allowed better access to the area to hunt muskox.

In a letter to Owen Wister (historian and writer of Western fiction,1860 – 1938) in October 1895, the artist noted that he was working on illustrations for Whitney’s Harper’s Monthly article. A second letter from Whitney to the artist on December 7, 1895, acknowledged that Whitney was pleased with the work and asked for additional illustrations. Since it is unclear if Remington had finished in December or was still working on the project in early 1896, the catalogue raisonne dates the current example and other illustrations for the story published in the February, March, and April issues with a date range of 1895 – 1896.

Both the painting and the frame appear to be in very good condition. The painting was examined under blacklight and exhibited minor inpainting: a few scattered dots at the lower left, a faint 3/4 inch vertical line in the sky, upper left, two pin dots at the upper right, and a one inch vertical line at the lower right center at the frame edge. The painting was cleaned and strip-lined in 2021.