Nothing 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.
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