Works of Art

Remington’s fourth subject in bronze was originally copyrighted December 8, 1898, as The Triumph. The Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company completed eleven sand castings before Remington shifted his work to Roman Bronze Works after 1900. At that point the artist made substantial changes to the model, and the resulting lost wax casts were marketed as The Scalp—the name by which both versions of the bronze are known today. The bronze reproduced here is one of ten examples produced by the Henry-Bonnard foundry in 1898–99; on the base, it is marked “THE HENRY-BONNARD BRONZE CO FOUNDERS N-Y 1899.” Writing on this bronze in the pages of Harper’s Weekly on December 17, 1898, the art critic Charles Caffin marveled at the artist’s “vivid and assured” ability to create a realistic subject based on “a faculty of observation quite extraordinary in its comprehensiveness.” He continued: “The line made by the horse’s foreleg upon the ground and the man’s arm is an axis of determined energy, around which the rest of the parts are distributed with an excellent sense of balance.”

From his earliest period as an illustrator Remington was fascinated by the American Indian. He visited many camps and reservations, collecting material that he would employ in his art for the rest of his life. This included a large number of Indian photographic portraits that depicted the ideal type that attracted him: tall and lithe, with sharply defined features, as he saw among tribes like the Apache, Cheyenne, or Sioux. For his part, Remington was unusally sympathetic to the general plight of the Indian in this period. As early as 1888 he had written: “The so-called Indian problem is no problem at all in reality, only that it has been made one by a long succession of acts which were masterly in their imbecility and were fostered by political avarice.” In his sculpture, the image of the Indian on horseback was a grand, romantic symbol of a way of life that was no more.