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4. Looking at Earth: On The Outlier (1909)
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look ing at e a rth On The Outlier (1909) 4 As we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it. | Goethe, Theory of Colours (1840) [44.222.169.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:03 GMT) 1. The “Art Critics Have All ‘Come Down’” I am the bone in a big art war down here and bones don’t have a good time. I stand for the proposition of ‘subjects’—painting something worth while as against painting nothing well—merely paint. I am right—otherwise I should as soon do tit tatting , high-art hair pins or recerchia ruffles on women’s pants. | Frederic Remington to Al Brolley, 8 December 1909 The old clearly defined range of “local color” was not enough. He would refine and, in refining, transform the notes in his scale. In doing this he unfolded new ideas and unsuspected resources. . . . It suggests a talent that was always ripening, an artistic personality that was always pressing forward. There was tragedy in its untimely loss. | Royal Cortissoz, from American Artists (1923) On 26 and 28 October 1909, approximately two months before his unexpected death from peritonitis caused by a burst appendix, Frederic Remington boxed up and shipped twenty-three of his most recent paintings—including The Hunters’ Supper—to the M. M. Knoedler & Company gallery in New York. For the next month or so Remington primarily worked on his big sculpture The Bronco Buster, and then, on the day after Thanksgiving, traveled to the city from his new home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, to check on the gallery’s preparations for his holiday show. For one thing, he wanted to see how the black frames he had ordered for the nocturnes looked with the paintings hung for display. His response, as he writes in his diary about this day’s visit to the gallery: “My frames at Knoedlers pretty near right. Look well.”1 On the following Tuesday, while nursing a gouty foot in bed at home, he addressed and mailed to friends, associates, and past clients the show’s publicity cards prepared for him by the gallery’s staff. Knoedler’s Looking at Earth 164 in the end delayed the show’s official opening until 4 December, and as a result of his continuing physical distress, Remington sent Eva to the gallery’s opening in his stead. Upon her return to Ridgefield, she reported the welcome news that a “great crowd” of people had visited the gallery. Six paintings sold on the show’s first day, including The Love Call, a nocturne keyed to blue tones that Remington had finished the previous July, supposedly in a single sitting. After this opening day’s strong start, however, sales had been disappointing as the week progressed , and Remington became apprehensive about the show’s overall commercial success. And with the exception of a laudatory note from Childe Hassam published in the New York Times, the city’s newspapers had not yet weighed in with any reviews of his latest work. As mentioned previously in my discussion of With the Eye of the Mind and The Hunters’ Supper, by the beginning of what turned out to be the last year of his life the artist was no longer supported by the monthly $1,000 stipend from Collier’s Weekly. As he notes in his diary on New Year’s Day 1909, “I am no longer on a salary and fully embarqued on the uncertain career of a painter. . . . ‘Who does not see that I have taken a road, in which incessantly and without labor I shall proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world.’—Montaigne.” Remington thus had become entirely dependent on the marketplace response to his paintings and sculptures, and—as his ledger books and checkbook stubs reveal—on his careful management of various stock market investments. Although in November he learned that the well-known art collector William T. Evans had purchased his Fired On (1907) for the purpose of donating it to the National Museum of American Art, Remington nevertheless remained anxious about both the upcoming critical reviews and the financial proceeds from the December 1909 holiday show at Knoedler’s. His personal diary entry for 10 November , for instance, voices his uncertainty about whether his art’s current direction would be appreciated, much less understood, by both the art-buying...