Frederic Remington Western Art “His First Lesson” Cushion

Frederic Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer best known for his art depicting the cowboys, soldiers and Native Americans of the Old West. A native of Canton, New York, Remington found inspiration in these subjects from an early age. He loved the idea of the frontier and travelled west many times. He greatly admired the rough and heroic cowboys and soldiers he met there, hearing their stories and following their lives in his visits as a journalist/illustrator. On these trips, Remington took a camera and made his own photographs, not as art, but as notes. He carried notebooks and sketched everything from distant horizons to the details of creases on leather boots. He worked for the great magazines of the 1880s and 1890s, and produced over 3,000 signed paintings and drawings. Most of them were illustrations, but many were made as art as he turned away from the publishing world and accomplished masterful art. This image is called “His First Lesson” and depicts cowboys fitting a wild bay horse with a new saddle and holding him steady while one cowboy attempts to mount and break him.