Frederic Remington

Frederic Sackrider Remington was born on October 4, 1861, in Canton, New York. As a boy he was sent to a series of military schools, including the Vermont Episcopal Institute, where he took his first drawing lessons, with an eye toward West Point that never materialized. In 1878 he enrolled in the newly formed School of Fine Arts at Yale University, studying under J. Alden Weir and John Henry Niemeyer and publishing his first illustration in the student paper, the Yale Courant. He left Yale in early 1880, after about three semesters, following his father's death, and never returned to complete a degree.

Remington spent much of the 1880s traveling and working in the American West and Southwest, material that fed a rapidly growing career as an illustrator for publications such as Harper's Weekly. He returned briefly to formal training in 1886, studying for about three months at the Art Students League in New York, which sharpened his drawing and technique. His paintings began appearing at the National Academy of Design in the late 1880s, including Return of a Blackfoot War Party in 1887 and A Dash for the Timber in 1889, and he held his first one-man exhibition at the American Art Galleries in New York in 1890. He was awarded the Hallgarten Prize in 1887, a second-class medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition, and was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1891.

Remington died on December 26, 1909, at his home near Ridgefield, Connecticut, at age forty-eight. Contemporary reporting in the New York Times and subsequent institutional accounts, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, attribute his death to peritonitis and shock following an emergency operation for appendicitis.

Remington's reputation moved steadily from popular illustrator to recognized fine artist during his own lifetime, a trajectory marked by his elections and prizes rather than by a single defining review: exhibition at the National Academy of Design in the late 1880s, the Hallgarten Prize and a Paris Exposition medal, and Associate status at the National Academy by 1891. Institutional attention has continued well past his death, most visibly in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2017 presentation of his work and in the ongoing scholarly and exhibition programs at the Frederic Remington Art Museum and the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. No verbatim critical assessment from a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile from the sources reviewed, so none is quoted here.

Remington's long-standing auction record, a bronze cast of Coming Through the Rye (modelled 1902) that sold for USD 11,223,500 at Christie's New York in 2017, held for nearly a decade. It was broken twice in quick succession on the evening of January 20, 2026, at Christie's New York, in the sale titled Visions of the West: The William I. Koch Collection. An Argument with the Town Marshall briefly set a new high before Coming to the Call sold moments later for USD 13,285,000, establishing the current auction record for the artist. Market reporting on that sale described total Remington proceeds that night in excess of USD 50 million, a figure that should be treated as a single-event high point rather than a stable annual pattern, given how infrequently major Remingtons come to market.

Remington has been deceased since 1909, so there is no dealer or gallery representation in the contemporary sense; his legacy is stewarded chiefly by the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, alongside major holdings at institutions such as the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art. No published catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, which places extra weight on provenance research and on cross-checking any work against known institutional holdings before purchase. Auction volume for his top-tier paintings and bronzes is low, so a single major sale, such as the January 2026 Christie's result, can move the artist's benchmark price sharply; collectors should treat any one data point as informative but not as a stable trend line.