Frederic Remington

Almost everything Americans think the Old West looked like — the bucking bronco, the cavalry charge, the lone rider against a huge sky — was shaped by a heavy, genial man from upstate New York who spent most of his life back East. Frederic Remington traveled the plains west of the Mississippi in the 1880s with a sketchbook, then sold the results to Harper's Weekly and other big magazines, feeding a hungry Eastern public its picture of cowboys, soldiers and Native Americans.

In 1895 he cast his first bronze, the Bronco Buster, a cowboy fighting to stay on a rearing horse, frozen at the worst instant. It sold immediately and made him the sculptor of the frontier as much as its illustrator.

Late in life something shifted. Around 1900 he began a series of night scenes, the nocturnes, working out how to paint darkness that stays full of color: moonlight on snow, the glow of a campfire, a figure barely lit at the edge of a cavalry camp. That quieter, searching painter was still emerging when he died suddenly in December 1909, at 48, of peritonitis after an emergency appendectomy that his weight had made dangerous.