EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 27 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

44 ‘John Ermine of the Yellowstone’, but its success was overshadowed by the book, ‘The Virginian’, written by his friend and sometime collaborator Owen Wister. After his failure with his Ermine book, Remington decided to concentrate on his paintings and sculptures. He haddiscovered the French Impressionists and thought that was the direction he should follow. In 1905 Collier’s dedicated a whole issue to his work, but Remington was finished with illustration. With the financial panic of 1907, came a slowdown in sales of Remington’s work. By 1908 fantasy artists such as Maxfield Parrish had become popular. Remington tried selling his home in New Rochelle to get further away from urbanization. He even burned dozens of oil paintings he had done as illustrations for magazines in a bonfire he made in his backyard, to show that he was over with illustration and only wanted to keep his landscape studies. Towards the end of his career he veered more and more into Impressionism, but regretted that he was studio-bound (resulting from his declining health) and could not devote time to paint en plein air like his French peers. His extreme obesity (he weighed over 21 stone or 300 pounds) caused him to have an emergency appendectomy, which led to peritonitis, eventually leading to his death on December 26, 1909. l l Other work at the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, NY or at https://fredericremington.org/