Frederic Remington's studio: a reflection

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1994 by Peter H. Hassrick

In complete contrast to Remington's studio was that of his contemporary William Merritt Chase, whose celebrated atelier in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York City was the era's most richly opulent.(6) Furnished with copies of old master paintings and original Renaissance furniture, Chase's studio epitomized a pervasively feminized art canon that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century. He and artists like him promulgated this view by using women not only as models but almost as decorative adjuncts to their studios and their art--luxury adornments rather than real people. Chase's studio was far more than his creative surroundings. It was also his sales gallery, a visual complement to the art being sold, as well as the subject of many of the partings themselves. Situated within the vortex of urban art activity, it was a sanctuary from the world of the mundane and ordinary. Its profusion of luxuriant objects and elegant inhabitants, stylishly arranged, provided a laboratory for Chase's mental and creative experiments. Its sumptuousness implied dignity, the exotic aura signified cosmopolitan sophistication, and the proper massing of materials provided confirmation of the artist's good taste.(7)

Not surprisingly, the perceived feminization of American culture represented by Chase and artists like him engendered a strong reaction from the likes of Remington. Fueled by leaders such as President Theodore Roosevelt, these artists sought to establish "islands of untainted masculinity and purified pockets of virility in separate institutions [such as men's clubs] that could socialize young men to the hardiness considered appropriate to their gender."(8) Remington certainly saw his studio as such an island, despite the tact that he equated the labor of the artist in the studio as fundamentally effete and unmanly.(9) It provided him with a refuge from the ordinary that bespoke not the suave cosmopolitanism of Chase's world but the harsh and sun-baked romantic frontier--an exotic distant world of fatal encounters and grim life-and-death struggles. Remington arranged his studio and the objects in it to plant the artist and his visitors firmly in the West of his experience, imagination, and art.

Remington never pictured his own studio, but in 1900 he commissioned the American artist Lyell Carr to paint a view of it. In the canvas a soldier stands near the huge brick fireplace as if waiting to be posed by Remington. Together with all the trappings of the studio he represents a continuity of experience in space and time, a transposition of the West to the East. In contrast, Chase's depictions of his studio, which he relished producing, are often peopled with his friends, patrons, and himself to evoke a sense of modernity that contrasts with the "old" things festooning the walls. His assemblages represent a continuity of aesthetic traditions from Europe to America.

The fundamental differences between Remington and Chase extended well beyond their surroundings. Chase was the exemplar of what the philosopher George Santayana referred to in 1911 as "the genteel tradition."(10) Its representatives espoused a pre-Darwinian classical world that celebrated European cultural antecedents and denounced modern life and society, particularly the emerging American middle class and anything that suggested impurity. These artists depicted "the pretty and carefree."(11) Remington, on the other hand, was fully invested in the world of individual and class struggle, which embraced and mythologized working-class Americans, the black cavalry known as the Buffalo soldiers, Hispanics, and Indians. Chase's white smocks and lace parasols were replaced in Remington's world by naked, dusty bodies and sweatstained slouch hats. While Chase's purpose was strictly pictorial, Remington's was boldly narrative. And whereas Chase's art reflected quiet beauty, poetically observed, Remington's pulsed with life and action and resonated with raw realism. In Chase's paintings there is a conscious avoidance of truth, while in Remington's works truth is the foundation of a didactic and moralistic order. His paintings depict Indians attacking stagecoaches or wagon trains, asserting themselves against the onslaught of white civilization. His cowboys saddle wild horses for breaking--a metaphor for civilization's conquest of the frontier.