On the Southern Plains Pocket Square

Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialised in depictions of the American Old West, specifically concentrating on scenes from the last quarter of the 19th century in the Western United States and featuring images of cowboys, Native Americans, and the U.S. Cavalry, among other figures from Western culture.

In the American West of 1881, he saw the vast prairies, the quickly shrinking buffalo herds, the still unfenced cattle, and the last major confrontations of U.S. Cavalry and Native American tribes, scenes he had imagined since his childhood. Seeing the west first hand gave Remington a more authentic view of the West than some of the later artists and writers who followed in his footsteps, such as N. C. Wyeth and Zane Grey, who arrived twenty-five years later when much of the mythic West had already slipped into history.

Remington was one of the first American artists to illustrate the true gait of the horse in motion (along with Thomas Eakins), as validated by the famous sequential photographs of Eadweard Muybridge. Previously, horses in full gallop were usually depicted with all four legs pointing out, like "hobby horses". The galloping horse became Remington's signature subject, copied and interpreted by many Western artists who followed him, adopting the correct anatomical motion.