subject: Ridgefield Ct Historic Homes: Fredric Remington House [print this page] The Fredric Remington House in Ridgefield, Connecticut was the home of the famous painter of American Western life Frederic Remington in the final years of his life. The two-story fieldstone-and-shingle house was designed by Remington himself where he created what are recognized as some of his best and most mature pieces of art in this home.
Remington's dynamic depictions of cowboys, cavalrymen and Indians captured the romance of the late 19th American West. He was one of the first American artists to accurately illustrate the true gait of a galloping horse and his ability to convey dynamic movement made his sketches particular alive.
Before Remington's time, horses in full gallop were depicted with all four legs pointing out "Hobby horse" style. The galloping horse became Remington's signature style at the same time the new technology of the camera confirmed the truth of how horses gallop. He wrote, "The artist must know more than the camera..." to convey the true feeling.
Fredric Remington was born in 1862 while his father was fighting in the Civil War and he and didn't see much of him for the first four years of his life. At one point in his early teens he was sent to a military academy in hopes of giving him a more disciplined character. His fellow cadets liked Remington and the sketches and silhouettes he made of them. But definitely not military material was the opinion of those around him. His father died when he was eighteen leaving him an inheritance that enabled him to travel to the west and follow his passions.
At nineteen in 1881 he made his first trip to Montana, where he experienced the vast prairies, the Rocky Mountains and was close to the last military clashes with the Indians he had imagined since his childhood. In 1883 Remington went to Peabody, Kansas to try sheep ranching. He invested his entire inheritance, but discovered that sheep ranching is a very rough, isolated life and he missed many of the refinements of life in the East.
He returned home at twenty-three to marry Eva Caten in 1884 and they returned to Kansas City to become half owners of a saloon. However, she was unhappy with saloon life and the sketches he made of the clientele, and just when he felt he had found his true calling as an artist she left him and returned home.
With his wife gone and the saloon business going badly, he started sketching and painting to barter for his living and soon was making enough money selling paintings to locals to see art as a profession. Remington returned home to the East, reunited with his wife and moved to Brooklyn where he began studies at the Art Students League of New York that had a major impact on his developing technique and illustration style.
At this time, eastern newspapers were showing a strong interest in the West and he submitted sketches and illustrations with Western themes to publications like Collier's - and his first full page cover appeared on Harper's Weekly January 9, 1886, at age twenty-five. His western images initially appeared as illustrations in the popular journals of his day. But as he matured as and artist, Remington shifted his attention away from illustration, concentrating more and more on painting and eventually sculpture.
About 1900 he began a series of what would eventually become over seventy paintings known as his "Nocturnes" that had as their subject the colors of night illuminated by firelight, candlelight and moonlight. He was captivated exploring the technical problems of painting darkness.
He moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut in the last years of his life where he designed and built the Remington House. He produced some of his finest work in Ridgefield including the sculpture "The Stampede" and the painting "The Love Call". In the last two years he ventured into impressionism. Frederic Remington died at the premature age of forty eight after an emergency appendectomy on December 26, 1909.
The Remington House is one of Ridgefield, Connecticut's most celebrated Historic Homes. In 1965 Ridgefield's Remington House was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as a lasting tribute to one of America's most gifted interpreters of the American West.
