Works of Art

Remington created the clay model for The Wicked Pony not long after The Broncho Buster, but it stayed in the artist’s studio for more than two years before it was finally put into plaster and cast in bronze, beginning in 1898. In this work, the horse appears to be triumphant. Remington derived the subject from an actual event he had witnessed, where a rider that had been thrown attempted to grab the horse’s head in retaliation and wrench it to the ground. “He was killed,” the artist noted tersely. “I saw it.” Unsurprisingly, the subject was not very popular with the buying public, and fewer than six casts produced in the artist’s lifetime by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company have been located. The general stylistic characteristics of a sand-cast bronze can be seen here: smooth, regular forms with very little undercutting and simple linear patterns that are easily reproducible in a sand mold. Once the cast pieces were removed from the mold and joined, the surface was “chased,” or finished, by sharpening up the details by hand with various cutting tools. An example of chasing may be seen on the finely articulated hair of the fallen rider.

The bronze was listed at Tiffany & Co. for $325—a higher price than some of his other bronzes, and perhaps another reason why sales were not very successful. Even so, more than one art critic of the day recognized Remington’s ability to convey an instant of time with daring compositional forms. “Though the action is momentary, its retention in bronze does not make it seem stiff,” one of them noted about The Wicked Pony. “The movement throughout is free and spontaneous.” A photograph taken at the time in Remington’s studio shows the artist and an assistant holding a male model in cowboy garb upside down in an effort to create a pose similar to that of the doomed rider in The Wicked Pony.