A Wild West Christmas, Courtesy of Frederic Remington and Sid Richardson

Remington’s nocturnes are full of spiritual feeling. Plus, a visit to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame

N othing can displace visions of sugarplums a week before Christmas, but, always thinking outside the box, I propose Frederic Remington’s nocturnes as a Christmas complement. When I was in Fort Worth in September, I visited the Sid Richardson Museum and the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Cowboys and cowgirls get Christmas, too, and the Richardson museum’s five nocturnes, though not all snowy things, are very, very beautiful. I filed them away for a counterintuitive Christmas piece. Richardson (1891–1959) was one of the giants of Texas’s oil business and culture. He collected nearly all the art at the museum.

Remington (1861–1909) is a limited though wonderful artist. His paintings, bronze sculptures, and vast number of newspaper and magazine illustrations defined the Wild West, its Indian skirmishes and last stands, endless prairies, horses — Remington was America’s best horse painter — as well as the everyday life of cowboys. Woke nuts savage him since, in their fevered, pretzeled minds, only Native artists can depict Native Americans and, of course, everything has to be a Trail of Tears. They get vegan coal in their stockings.

Immensely fat, gouty, and lumbering, Remington in the last few years of his life managed to step aside from his raw, factual, action-packed scenes and the illustration rat race and focus on night scenes and moonscapes that we call nocturnes. He painted around 70 of them. They’re not Christmas pictures — no Mary, no manger, no magi, and certainly no holy baby — but they’re indeed night scenes, mostly still and hushed, evoking the unseen and the inscrutable. Apache Medicine Song, from 1908, at the Richardson Museum, is prayerful. The Love Call, from 1909, is romantic, but is the subject wooing the moon and stars, calling what’s divine and eternal rather than what’s carnal? A Figure of the Night (The Sentinel), also from 1908, is a nocturne and a snow scene. It’s cryptic and seems like a ghost story.

Remington came close to being a ne’er-do-well. Pampered as a child, aimless as a young man, he spent some time at Yale’s art school, traveled through the American West in a series of “gap years,” flirted with saloon life, married, and stumbled into life as an illustrator in the 1880s for Harper’s Weekly, whose star illustrator in the 1860s into the ’70s was Winslow Homer. Remington exaggerated his Western experience enough to get an assignment to cover, with texts and drawings, the Apache wars in the late 1880s. He illustrated Theodore Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail in 1888 and became the star illustrator of life on the frontier for Harper’s as well as Collier’s magazine. By the late 1880s, he was painting grand cowboy-and-Indian shoot-’em-up pictures.

Why nocturnes? Remington coveted the status of a high-art painter-philosopher and believed that fame as an illustrator, even a painter-illustrator, wasn’t the way to go. One way to go was Whistler’s way: to paint nocturnes. Though Whistler (1834–1903) moved to Paris as a young man and then London and never came back to America, he considered himself American. He was also the most-written-about artist in the 19th century, in part for his disputatious personality but also for his nocturnes, eerie and aloof things that are an amalgam of the timeless and the modern.

Nighttime, the realm of obscurity, sleep, and dreams, has always been with us, but in Whistler’s era, artificial light came to Paris and London. Artists responded to new scenes and stimulated a new interest in nocturnes. For all their modernity, nocturnes still evoked the Old Masters. The Nativity and the Flight into Egypt were art staples from Giotto to Rembrandt. Caravaggio, a creature of the night, put his own spin on the nocturne. In America, Remington led the charge, so to speak, making the nocturne his late claim to fame.

The Sid Richardson Museum is tiny, located on a single first-floor story on historic Sundance Square in the center of Fort Worth. It opened in 1982 and houses Richardson’s superb collection of Remingtons as well as work by Charles Russell (1864–1926), Remington’s peer and an authentic Westerner and, in his young days, a cowboy. The square is not part of Fort Worth’s culture district where the Kimbell, the contemporary-art museum; the Amon Carter Museum; and the Cowgirl Hall of Fame are all located. The Richardson is a dazzling gem best left on its own. The small lobby makes for a succinct introduction via Coming Through the Rye, a boisterous Remington bronze from 1902. Four cowboys on horseback, in a celebratory frame of mind, which probably means drunk, ride like maniacs, pistols firing in the air, gun control laws be damned. What a relief to be welcomed with art. There’s a portrait of Richardson, a Wild West photo mural, and an introductory panel.

There are three galleries in the museum, but the plan is more open than most. I immediately went to the Remington nocturnes. A Taint on the Wind, from 1906, is a stagecoach scene, so it’s an archaic West. The Overland Stage Line from St. Louis to San Francisco began rolling in 1858 but had a very short life owing to the railroad’s advent. By Remington’s time, the stagecoach was the property of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and American fiction. What’s the taint? Traveling at night, the horses suddenly smell danger. They’ve put on the equine brakes. Is it a pack of wolves or a bear? We don’t know. One horse rears. Moonlight casts intense shadows and turns the trail into a neon-white. Remington’s handling of paint in his nocturnes is very different from his linear, crisp, and clear paintings from the 1890s. Though he’s no American Impressionist, he’s looser and suggestive in his nocturnes.

A Taint on the Wind is displayed among movie posters. John Ford’s Stagecoach, from 1939, was an obvious choice since it’s among the most famous Westerns and the zenith of stagecoach dramas. It’s more than 30 years removed from A Taint on the Wind, but Remington, Russell, and other painters and illustrators of the Wild West influenced movies in their earliest days. Rare footage from Buffalo Bill Cody’s silent film The Indian Wars, from 1913, is on view on a gallery monitor.

Apache Medicine Song is a classic Remington nocturne. It’s quiet and, unlike A Taint on the Wind, doesn’t force a storyline on us. It’s a starlight picture, but the primary light comes from a hidden fire, introducing oranges and yellows to Remington’s indigo blue and midnight green. There’s so much green in Remington’s nocturnes. His greens, blues, and yellows, his stars, moon, and fire together signify things that are universal.

A Figure of the Night, a moonlight painting, is as much about intense, grasping shadows as the horse and rider. They assert, while the rider and his horse, material and concrete, seem recessive. A Figure of the Night and The Luckless Hunter, from 1909, one of Remington’s last pictures, are the most ghostly, not haunting but moody and evocative. Both are winter nocturnes. The flat, frozen wilderness hints at a story, but, unlike, say, Remington’s Coming Through the Rye, as an extreme example, it doesn’t inflict one on us. “Keep on pushin’ on” might be one, and that could be a spiritual one. We’re left to our own thoughts.

Cow-Boys Coming to Town for Christmas, from 1889, a Harper’s Weekly illustration, is standard Remington. Coming Through the Rye draws from it. No one’s shooting guns in the air. We’re seeing revelry rather than irrational exuberance. It might very well be a fairy tale Christmas, since being a cowboy was lonely, isolated work, often far from settlements. Frontier Christmases for cowboys and for families living in settlements or on farms didn’t lack for hearty food, all homegrown, but gifts were modest — for children a piece of candy, a new penny, a special personal cake, or new, hand-knit mittens. Christmas in art? In America it’s rare. American artists rarely did religious art. Buyers seemed allergic to it. The old Puritan aversion to graven images lasted longer than the Puritans. Norman Rockwell and Grandma Moses did Christmas art, emphasizing snow, cold, family reunions, and presents. In the 1860s, Thomas Nast created the image of a fat, white-bearded Santa Claus.

Among the many beauties of the Richardson museum is the victory of less over more. It’s a small place with a focused collection. The galleries are elegant and gracious. The museum doesn’t beat us over the head with interpretation. And it’s not only Remington. Russell is underrated, since he’s more literal, but he’s an exceptionally good figure painter and far more of an anthropologist than Remington. Remington was an Easterner, from the part of the country that we know today as the Acela Corridor. Russell is Montana through and through. There are great things on view by Russell, William Leigh, and Frank Tenney Johnson, too.

I love Texas oil tycoons. H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Hugh Roy Cullen, Glenn McCarthy, T. Boone Pickens — don’t you love that name — and, of course, Richardson, among many others. They were wildcatters, gamblers, dowsers, also called creekologists, and all-round coots. They could smell oil, however deep in the ground those algae and plankton reposed, cooking over millions of years till they were black gold. Oil is essential to America’s wealth, freedom, and opportunity, and Texans like Richardson, go-and-get-it types, understood this better than almost anyone. Richardson made his first fortune trading cattle in high school, then got really, really rich in oil scouting and drilling, and refining and selling well equipment, ranching, and railroads.

FDR was a crony. Richardson put big money into LBJ’s 1948 Senate race, a stolen election, as we all know. In 1952, he pushed Ike hard, then ditched him in 1956 after he vetoed a special interest natural gas bill. Richardson was called the billionaire bachelor and a mystery man. In his lifetime, he gave millions to Texas schools. His foundation has given hundreds of millions to education, health care, and the arts. It’s still going strong and funds the museum.

Richardson started building a serious collection of Western art, primarily by Remington and Russell, in the early 1940s, advised by the New York dealer Bertram Newhouse. He’s a contemporary of Amon Carter, who also collected Western art by Russell, Remington, and others, lived in Fort Worth, and opened a museum. The Amon Carter Museum has evolved into an encyclopedic American-art museum, but its cowboy-and-Indian paintings still have a place of pride. Fort Worth takes itself seriously as the gateway to the West and, putting aside Van Cliburn, a Fort Worth hero, reveres its Wild West past.

Since I’m doing a cowboy Christmas story, I can’t neglect the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. I visited at an awkward moment, as it’s doing a $19 million expansion, but it’s not a construction site to the point that a good visit can’t be had. It is a museum with good galleries devoted to the work of Western women artists, Western women’s fashion, and Western women heroes in the fields of ranching, entertainment, horse-breeding and riding, literature, art, and politics. Its Hall of Fame salutes high achievers in these fields. Its overall goal is to write women into the visual story of the American West. Remington, for instance, almost never depicts women. Russell does squaws here and there. The need for the Hall of Fame is clear. Frontier women did as much heavy lifting as the men did, and they weren’t boozing and shooting pistols in the air. They did serious work.

There was a surprising, engaging exhibition about the women in the escaramuza charra, the Mexican women’s rodeo — “skirmish of the horsewomen” — and another show of the work of Lynda Lanker (born in 1943), who paints ranch life among women. There are cases of women’s cowboy boots and hats, too. The museum is fun, heartening, and educational. A vast gallery on women and horses and celebrities such as Annie Oakley looks great. Production values are high. Goodness, Oakley’s gun is there, as is Dale Evans’s silver saddle. Who doesn’t love the movie Annie Get Your Gun? But then there’s Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, from 1954; the women in 1969’s True Grit; Barbara Stanwyck, the matriarch in The Big Valley TV series from the 1960s; and Marlene Dietrich in 1939’s Destry Rides Again, she of the hair-pulling, face-slapping, kicking-and-biting brawl with Una Merkel. Alas, the entire second floor of the museum closes after Christmas as part of the renovation and addition. I’ll write about the Hall of Fame when its building project is done and I can see it in its new splendor.

The Christmas tree in Sundance Square is, in Texas-style, not only the biggest in Texas but bigger than the tree in Rockefeller Center and the national Christmas tree in Washington, D.C. A 162-foot live tree in Coeur d’Alene is said to be America’s biggest. It’s a giant fir decorated with tens of thousands of lights. Santa Fe, which I visited in August, isn’t as much about Christmas trees as festive lanterns, but it works. Florida and Southern California do their best, but “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” is a preposterous proposition.