Erwin E. Smith: Teaching Guide

			About Frederic Remington (1861–1909)
			Although Erwin Smith was familiar with the illustrations, paintings, and sculptures of cowboy life by Frederic Remington, he did not regard his work as highly as the paintings of Charles M. Russell. Smith identified inaccuracies in Remington's works of art. For example, Smith criticized how Remington had positioned the horse and rider of the Bronco Buster (1895). The mouth of the horse was right, Smith conceded, but not the legs, noting that "no bronco draws his forelegs under his head that way when he pitches. The legs are held straight out, stiff, and rigid."
			Frederic Remington (1861–1909) The Bronco Buster, 1895, cast ca. 1905 Bronze Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas 1961.3	Erwin E. Smith (1886–1947) Monclavio Lucero on a Rearing Bronco in the LS Corral, LS Ranch, Texas, 1907 Nitrate negative Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas LC.S59.017
			Despite Smith's criticism of Remington's lack of attention to details in his work, he derived some of the ideas for his compositions from the elder artist's work. Erwin Smith and other western enthusiasts were familiar with Remington's illustrations for Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Collier's: The National Weekly. The cowboy images appearing in these popular periodicals made Remington a huge success and continued to perpetuate the idea of a rugged, romantic life on the frontier. Remington was one of the first western artists who began to standardize the image of the cowboy as "the wild rider of the plains." In 1902, when Remington painted a galloping cowboy for a series for Scribner's magazine titled Western Types, he elevated the status of the cowboy to that of a mythical figure. Similarly, some of Erwin Smith's photographs capture the romantic image of the lone cowboy on horseback amidst a rugged terrain. Years before Erwin Smith photographed the vanishing life of cowboys on the open range, Frederic Remington was mourning its passing in his painting The Fall of the Cowboy. Cowboy life riding the trails and working the roundup became restricted with the introduction of fences and barbed wire. Remington's painting of two cowboys who have halted their horses before a fence in a wintry landscape is a dramatic contrast to his earlier scenes of high action on a vast, open range.

About Frederic Remington (1861–1909)