Hostiles Watching the Column

Alternate TitleThe Scout

Artist Frederic Remington (American, 1861 - 1909)

Dateca. 1896-1897

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 25 x 27 1/4 inches (63.5 x 69.22 cm)
Framed: 35 3/4 x 38 3/4 inches (90.81 x 98.43 cm)

Credit LineGift of the Newhouse Galleries

Object number32-12

SignedSigned lower right: Frederic Remington —

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

American Art

Terms

DescriptionA Plains Indian mounted on horseback scans the horizon.Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Winfield High School, Kans., October 19–November 14, 1936, no cat.

[“Exhibition in Conjunction with the Consumers Cooperative Association’s 30th Annual Meeting”], Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City, Mo., December 2–5, 1958, no cat.

Kansas Centennial Historical Art Exhibition, Mulvane Art Center, Washburn University, Topeka, Kans., January 29–March 28 1961, no. 37.

Missouri Cultural Exhibit, Missouri Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, March 12, 1964–November 10, 1965, no cat. (as The Scout).

Gallery Label

In Hostiles Watching the Column Frederic Remington offers a meditation on the impact of western settlement on American Indian life. In this view of two Plains scouts observing enemies, Remington's low viewpoint and relatively thick paint assert the protagonists' regal bearing and create palpable psychological tension. Such effects differ markedly from Remington's earlier American Indian subjects in which he painted stories of contemporary western life in complex arrangements. This shift can be attributed in part to the nobility of Indian resistance that the painter began to recognize in the 1890s, by which time most native peoples had been confined to reservations. Remington's coincident move away from linear storytelling was also part of a larger tendency in late-19th-century American art.

Provenance

(Newhouse Galleries, New York);

to NAMA, 1932.

Published References

Frederic Remington, Drawings (New York: R. H. Russell; London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1897), unpaginated.

Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, “Frederic Remington’s Wild West Comes East,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 4, 1923, Magazine sec., 1.

Merle Johnson Collection, Reproductions from the Work of Frederic Remington (New York: New York Public Library, 1930), 8:97.

“The Acquisitions,” Art Digest 8 (December 1, 1933), 28 (as The Scout).

“The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art: Complete Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings,” Art News 32 (December 9, 1933), 28.

Handbook of the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1933), 138 (as The Scout).

“Liberal with Art,” Kansas City Star, January 1, 1936, 8 (as The Scout).

The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts: Founders and Benefactors (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1940), 25 (as The Scout).

The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 2^nd ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1941), 166 (as The Scout).

Helen L. Card Collection, Frederic Remington: Artist Historian of the Old West (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, c. 1944), 5: unpaginated.

Harold McCracken, Frederic Remington: Artist of the Old West (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1947), 145.

Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4^th ed. (Kansas City, Mo.: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 257 (as The Scout).

Kansas Centennial Historical Art Exhibition, exh. cat. (Topeka, Kans.: Mulvane Art Center, Washburn University, 1961), unpaginated (as The Scout).

“Missouri Cultural Exhibit Features Missouri Artists and Missouri History at New York World’s Fair,” Missouri Historical Review 58 (July 1964), 481 (as The Scout).

Clide Hollmann, Five Artists of the Old West (New York: Hastings House, 1965), 91 (as The Scout).

Marta Jackson, ed., The Illustrations of Frederic Remington with a Commentary by Owen Wister (New York: Bounty Books, 1970), 177.

Henry C. Pitz, Frederic Remington: 173 Drawings and Illustrations (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), xi, no. 27.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 254 (as The Scout).

Ross E. Taggart, “American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,” Antiques 122 (November 1982), 1031, 1039 (as The Scout).

Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 114–15.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Large-Scale Projects (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 552.

Peter H. Hassrick and Melissa J. Webster, Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings (Cody, Wyo.: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1996), 2:609, CD-ROM, no. 2179.

Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 456-59 (repro.), 2: 204-05 (repro.).

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