Off the Range (Coming Through the Rye)

Frederic Remington

National Gallery of Art

Four men on horseback riding side by side hold revolvers up in the air in this freestanding bronze sculpture. All four wear gloves with long cuffs and wide-brimmed hats. Their eyes are delineated as slits to suggest they are closed or nearly so, and their mouths are wide open. Their right hands, to our left, are raised holding revolvers in the air, and they hold the reins of the horses with their other hands. Three of the men have bushy mustaches and one, second from our right, has a full, trimmed beard. Two have long, shoulder-length hair, which alternate with the other two who seem to have close-cropped hair. The horses all run with their legs at different angles, all with two legs off the ground except the leftmost horse, who has three feet midair in a long stride. The horses’ heads pull forward as the riders pull up. In this photograph the sculpture is angled away from us to our left, so we see the most of the rider and horse closest to us to our right. He wears wide chaps, and a booted foot is snug in the stirrup on the side we can see. The base beneath the horses’ feet is modeled coarsely to suggest earth. Light creates white highlights on the dark brown bronze, and some surfaces are a little rough, especially on the horses’ bodies. The artist inscribed the right side of the base, “Frederic Remington” and a nearby inscription reads, “Copyrighted by Frederic Remington 1902.”