The Romantic West of Frederic Remington
The painter and sculptor Frederic Remington also captured the romance of the West and its image as an alternative to the settled civilization of the East. He portrayed the cowboy as a natural aristocrat, much like Wister's Virginian, living in a natural world in which all the normal supporting structures of "civilization" were missing. The romantic quality of his work made Remington one of the most beloved and successful artists of the nineteenth century - and one is still exceptionally popular today. Frederic Remington is perhaps best known for his sculptures of cowboys and their horses, but he was also a popular painter of western scenes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was, like both Wister and Remington, a man born and raised in the East, traveled to the Dakota Badlands in the mid-1880s to help himself recover from the sudden death of his young wife. He had long, romanticized the West as a place of physical regeneration - a place where a man could gain strength through rugged activity (just as Roosevelt himself, a sickly, asthmatic boy, had hardened himself through adherence to the idea of a strenuous life). His long sojourn into the Badlands in the 1880s cemented his love of the region, which continued to the end of his life. And like Wister and Remington, he made his own fascination with the West a part of the nation's popular culture. In the 1890s, he published a four-volume history, The Winning of the West, with a romanticized account of the spread of white civilization into the frontier. These and other books on the West enhanced his own reputation. They also contributed to the public's fascination with the "frontier." (quoted from "The Conquest of the Far West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, 1999)
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