Off the Range (Coming Through the Rye)

This virtuosic sculpture depicts four cowboys astride their galloping horses "shooting pistols and shouting," as Frederic Remington wrote, suggesting the bravado and energy that characterized the frontier way of life. One look at the horsemen reveals that they are not attacking or escaping from enemies, however, but rather immersed in drunken revelry. Remington wrote of the cowboy: "When he ‘turns loose' in town [he] does it in a thorough way. His animation vents itself in shrieks and yells, the firing of the revolver, and the mad gallop."

One of the most prominent artist-interpreters of the American West, Remington produced a large body of work in sculpture, illustration, painting, fiction, and nonfiction that popularized the cowboy as a national folk hero. Working in his studio in New Rochelle, New York, between his frequent travels west, the artist based the lively composition of _Off the Range_ on two of his earlier illustrations and on other images of "the charge."

_Off the Range_ is the artist's most complex sculptural group. Remington pushed the structural limits of the bronze medium, boasting to the owner of the Roman Bronze Works foundry during the casting: "I have six horses' feet on the ground and 10 in the air." Four of these 10 belong to the horse on the far left, whose hooves do not touch the ground at all.

In 1905, the Corcoran Gallery of Art purchased this sculpture and _Mountain Man_ (1903, also National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection), making it the first museum to acquire Remington's bronzes. The Corcoran apparently was unwilling to embrace Remington's subject and asked him to propose an alternate to the copyrighted title, _Coming Through the Rye_. Remington offered _Off the Range_, the name of his monumental plaster of the same subject shown at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis; Corcoran director Frederick B. McGuire approved the new title as "much more appropriate for the work."