The Rattlesnake
signed
bronze
H: 23” x L : 15 1/2” x W: 9 1/2” (58 cm x 39 cm x 24 cm)

In American art, Frederic Remington is counted among the genre painters who found their inspiration in the Western frontier. Remington also developed a sculptor’s 360-degree sense of vision but until a chance remark by playwright Augustus Thomas in 1895, Remington had not yet conceived of himself as a sculptor and thought of it as a separate art for which he had no training or aptitude. With help from friend and sculptor Frederick Ruckstull, Remington constructed his first armature and clay model, a “broncho buster” where the horse is reared on its hind legs—technically a very challenging subject. After several months, the novice sculptor overcame the difficulties and had a plaster cast made, then bronze copies, which were sold at Tiffany’s.

Sculpting was a new medium for Remington at this time, and this new method of portrayal was a total success in the eyes of his collectors and art historians. Breaking away from the restricted limits of flat paper, pen and ink and watercolor, Remington stampeded right to the next level of his artistic potential, through the more effective medium of three dimensional expressions. His first works produced by the lost wax (or cire perdue) method, a higher quality process than the earlier sand casting method he had employed.

The weathered cowboy astride the tense and anguished body of the rearing horse serves as a metaphor for the struggle between those Americans who felt the West represented the United States’ “manifest destiny,” and the people who actually lived there, and already had suffered at the hands of a foreign government willing to take possession of their land andredistribute it to official citizens.