Works of Art

This early opaque watercolor study, with Remington’s notations at the bottom, was probably intended as an illustration for Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, published by the Century Company in 1888. In the book Roosevelt wrote about hunting elk in the Rocky Mountains, where he killed a large trophy bull with his own rifle. “I shot him early one morning, while still-hunting through the open glades of a great pine forest, where the frosty dew was still heavy on the grass,” Roosevelt reported. “We had listened to him and his fellows challenging each other all night long. Near by the call of the bulls in the rutting season—their ’whistling,’ as the frontiersmen term it—sounds harsh and grating; but heard in the depths of their own mountain fastnesses, ringing through the frosty night, and echoing across the ravines and silent archways of the pines, it has a grand, musical beauty of its own that makes it, to me, one of the most attractive sounds in nature.”