Works of Art

The cowboy was one of Remington’s principal subjects, and he considered himself an expert on the evolution of the type in western history. Yet as early as 1895 he was asserting that the true cowboy was “extinct except in the far away places of the Rocky Mountains.” For Remington and many others, the heroic era was the West of the open range. He warned his friend, the writer Owen Wister: “Don’t mistake the nice young men who amble around wire fences for the wild rider of the Plains.” As for the horses they rode, Remington believed the best of them were bred in the mountains, and he admired their “great lung power” and “hoofs like iron.” In his later artwork he seemed to have found his equine ideal in his own horse, fittingly named Beauty, who became the subject of a large number of photographs in the artist’s personal collection.

Remington completed an initial version of The Rattlesnake in January 1905, and he was immensely pleased with its daring off-balance composition. However, three years later, after ten casts were produced, he grew dissatisfied with the original design, reworking the plaster model into a larger, more massive form. The changes included tucking the horse’s forelegs and straightening its rear legs, thus increasing the tension of the animal’s pose, and thrusting the rider forward so he became more integral with the sidelong motion of the composition. It is estimated that only four casts were completed under his supervision. The Amon Carter Museum’s cast #11, reproduced here, is one of only two of those casts that have been located.