“Conjuring Back the Buffalo”
This oil on canvas painting, titled “Conjuring Back the Buffalo”, is by the American artist, Frederic Remington, from 1889. In it, an indigenous American holds up the skull of a buffalo towards the sky with several more buffalo skulls at his feet. Remington is remembered for his artwork chronicling the old American West. This is one of many nocturnal scenes that Remington painted.
A native New Yorker who was enamored with the “Wild West”, Remington had moved to Kansas with his wife in 1883 to try his hand at running a sheep ranch. Though the business venture was unsuccessful, his illustrations depicting the American West as he saw it were very popular. His works were published in periodicals and journals, including such notable ones as Harper’s Weekly.
Remington’s art focused on outdoor scenes. He never painted women and only rarely depicted violence. He said ” My drawing is done entirely from memory. I never use a camera now. The interesting never occurs in nature as a whole, but in pieces. It’s more what I leave out than what I add.”
“Conjuring Back the Buffalo” is currently in the collections of the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, in Washington State, having been gifted from a private collection in 2012.
For more on Frederic Remington, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
