Standing Off Indians
On loan to The Met
This work of art is currently on loan to the museum.Early in his career, Remington had the good fortune to provide illustrations for a series of articles by Theodore Roosevelt for Century Magazine: "Ranch Life in the Far West" (1888), later collected in the book Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. Like Remington, Roosevelt lived in the American West in the 1880s, and his adventures there served as fodder for his frontier mythology. Standing Off Indians, reproduced as a wood engraving in the May 1888 issue, accompanied the tale of a brief encounter between Roosevelt and a group of Plains Indians. He has dismounted and aimed his rifle, the stand-off negotiated and ended through a sequence of coded actions. Many of Remington’s depictions of the West contain allusions to confrontation in contested territory, whether obvious or implicit.
Artwork Details
- Title: Standing Off Indians
- Artist: Frederic Remington (American, Canton, New York 1861–1909 Ridgefield, Connecticut)
- Date: ca. 1888
- Culture: American
- Medium: Oil on board
- Dimensions: Framed: 23 × 29 in. (58.4 × 73.7 cm)
Unframed: 18 × 24 in. (45.7 × 61 cm) - Credit Line: Private collection
- Curatorial Department: The American Wing