In the Remington Moment

1. Looking at Water: On Coming to the Call (1905)

look ing at Water On Coming to the Call (1905) 1 Water can stand for what is unconscious, instinctive, and sexual in us, for the creative swill in which we fish for ideas. It carries, weightlessly, the imponderable things in our lives: death and creation. | Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (1985) 1. Coming to the Call Painting should call out to the viewer . . . and the surprised viewer should go to it, as if entering a conversation. | Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (1676) Perhaps indeed the idea of a narrative, as opposed to spell or exorcism or invocation , originated in a hunting society, from the experience of interpreting tracks. . . . The hunter could have been the first “to tell a story” because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent (though not imperceptible ) signs left by their prey. | Carlo Ginzburg (1992) In Frederic Remington’s nocturne Coming to the Call (1905) “the silent (though not imperceptible) signs” left on the canvas suggest that the end is near, right now and right here: a spit of land ends at the water’s edge; an autumn day ends as the sun now sets and as the shadows on the water now lengthen. And too: there is the imminent end of a prey animal’s life as a solitary hunter in a birchbark canoe, camouflaged by shadows, sights his rifle in on a bull moose, now exposed on the margin of this lake’s still yellow water. This hunter and his leveled rifle, both barely visible in the motionless birchbark canoe on the painting ’s left, and this bull moose’s stationary pose on the slightly elevated spit of land, concentrate this narrative of the end in the painting’s mid-ground plane. And yet, on the right, in the far distance beyond the silhouetted bull moose, the pale lavender or periwinkle band of color outlining the horizon line of hills across the lake establishes a horizontal line paralleling the imaginary horizontal line that arcs between hunter’s gaze, his rifle, and the bull moose. As a result, Remington’s layering of these horizontal lines inclines this painting’s visual weight Looking at Water 30 toward, and then beyond, this bull moose at the painting’s center, this figure whose shadow on the lake’s reflecting surface complements that thrown by the prow of the hunter’s canoe, and on toward the slivered wafer of sun that has dissolved behind these distant, low-lying hills across the lake. The sun’s ritual disappearing act both transfigures this lake’s watery surface into glossy lemon yellow pools and also, nearer to us on the painting’s left mid-ground plane, it translates the rather dense enclosure of trees and brush into clustered arcs and serrated towers of deep sienna and ocher. In concert with the painting’s overall composition, Remington’s chromatic register both starkly frames this bull moose before the sun’s dying light and also fosters the painting ’s swelling autumnal mood. As if the deep, glowing red orange light thinly lining the far horizon of hills anticipates how this prey animal’s blood will stain this fully realized threshold topography where land and water, light and shadow, human and animal, and life and death intersect and commingle. Remington’s composition of dark and light passages in Coming to the Call coheres largely because a slightly elevated horizontal line serves to bind together a concealed hunter and his leveled rifle, the silhouetted profile of a bull moose, and a distant range of hills refracting the setting sun’s waning yellow light. The viewer’s gaze is invited to move from left to right, just as what happens—in Anglo-European cultures at least—when readers process words printed on a page. And by tracing the arc of these layered horizontal lines from left to right, which is to say from an area of darkness to what remains of the day’s light, a coherent narrative sequence emerges from, or at least is implied by, this hunter’s and this moose’s now momentarily arrested poses. To the left, where the sun’s light has already retreated and the encroaching darkness seems as certain as the shadows are long, is the immediate past of the “call” and the hunter’s vigil and the moose’s day heretofore spent under cover. Before this...