Frederic Remington:

He Knew the Horse

Frederic Remington’s pictures and sculptures depicting the Old West are in countless museums and collections, and bring large prices: A sculpture in bronze, called “The Wounded Bunkie,” sold at auction for $5.6 million in 2008 while an oil painting, “A Reconnaissance,” fetched $5.2 million at a 1999 auction. 

Even postal people love him: Few Americans outside of presidents like George Washington have been so extensively remembered on United States postage stamps—at least six bear his art or his face.

Unfortunately for Remington, his stay in Ridgefield was brief. He died six months after arriving.

Though his fame is based on the Old West that he so colorfully documented, Frederic Sackrider Remington spent all but a few years of his life in the Northeast. He was born in 1861 in Canton, N.Y., son of a newspaper editor who wanted him to pursue that career. 

While he attended military schools in Vermont and Massachusetts, Remington found he loved to draw more than to write or fight, and he wound up attending the School of Fine Arts at Yale, where he also played football for the Bulldogs. His first published illustration was a cartoon of a “bandaged football player” for a student newspaper. 

He left Yale when his father became seriously ill and died. With an inheritance in hand, Remington decided against returning to college, and headed west in 1881 to seek adventure; he was only 19 years old. In the next few years, he traveled widely in the western states and territories, working as a cowboy, a sheep rancher, a saloon owner, a reporter, and at other jobs—all the while sketching what he was seeing. 

Around 1885, he came back east, studied at the Art Students League, and began an illustrating career with Harper’s Magazine in the days before photographs were common in publications. He returned to the West briefly to cover the Indian Wars in Apache country for Harper’s. By then, he was earning $1,200 a year as a commercial artist, a sizable sum at the time. “That’s a pretty good break for an ex cow-puncher,” he said. 

Remington went on to illustrate not only for magazines, but also books, and wound up writing a half dozen books of his own about the West. Virtually all of his illustrations, his paintings and later his sculpture dealt with the Western themes.  “I knew the wild riders and vacant lands were about to vanish forever,” he wrote. “And the more I considered the subject, the bigger the forever loomed.”

While he became widely praised as an illustrator, Remington wanted recognition as an artist. By the turn of the 20th century, he was devoting much of his time to painting and sculpture—and even burned many earlier works he felt were too much like illustrations.
Remington was living and working in New Rochelle, N.Y. when he decided he wanted a wilder environment. (Another noted New Rochelle artist-illustrator later did the same; Norman Rockwell moved first to Vermont, and later Stockbridge, Mass.) 

There are several stories about why Remington chose Ridgefield. One was that the town was recommended by his lifelong friend, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, with whom he had grown up in upstate New York; Hepburn, Chase Bank president, had recently built a mansion on High Ridge, called Altnacraig. 

Another explanation was that Poultney Bigelow, a close friend who was editor and founder of Outing magazine, had recommended Ridgefield for both its wildness and its sophistication. Bigelow lived in nearby New York State and probably knew the town from visits. 

Perhaps both Hepburn and Bigelow had talked up the town to Remington, who at the same time was being strongly influenced by the Impressionist movement—and a leading impressionist, J. Alden Weir, lived in Ridgefield and was often visited by Remington’s friend, Childe Hassam.

Remington wound up buying 42 acres along Barry Avenue on which he and his wife, Eva, designed a sizable home and a state-of-the-art studio that featured a huge fieldstone fireplace, and large (for the era) plate glass windows. The estate was known as Lural Place, according to his

Ridgefield Press obituary, but another source said he called it “One Hoss Farm.” After his death the estate became known as Oak Knoll, a name that has stuck over the decades since.
Remington moved into the home in July 1909. In December, he fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with appendicitis that developed into peritonitis. His condition was said to have been exacerbated by his treating himself with laxatives and the fact that he weighed 300 pounds. 

An emergency operation was performed at his house—reportedly on the dining room table. As The Press said at the time, “The artist rallied after the operation and it was believed he would recover. Complications, however, entered into the case on Saturday and the patient sank rapidly during the night.” He died Sunday, the day after Christmas. He was only 48 years old. 

During his career Remington produced more than 3,000 drawings, illustrations, paintings, and bronzes. “The extent of what he might have been was curtailed only by his untimely death at a time when he could have had 20 years of growth ahead of him, but he was already the paramount exponent of his kind of art and the most American of them all,” said biographers Peggy and Harold Samuels.

Remington loved riding and depicting horses in action, be it on canvass or in bronze. “When I die,” he told a friend not long before his death, “I want my epitaph to be, ‘He knew the horse.’” However, his spare gravestone in Canton, N.Y., bears only his name and the years of his birth and death.
In 1965, Remington’s house was declared a national historic landmark. The studio he had in the house has been reproduced in detail at the Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg, N.Y., where his family once lived. 

For years, townspeople had wanted a road name recalling the artist. From shortly after his death until well into the 1950s, various movements tried to have Barry Avenue changed to Remington Road. In fact, a 1927 map of property along Barry Avenue called the highway “Remington Road.”
A new road at the1960s Westmoreland subdivision gave the town an opportunity to commemorate the artist: Remington Road runs between Barry Avenue and Peaceable Hill Road, intersecting Barry Avenue not far from Remington’s house. 

Perhaps the artist had gotten a chance to hunt on the Westmoreland estate during his brief stay here.—from “Hidden History of Ridgefield,” History Press, 2015

Frederick Shrady: 

Artist Who Rescued Art

A well-taught painter turned self-taught sculptor, Frederick Shrady became  internationally famous for his art, especially on religious subjects. But as he was gaining fame as an artist, he was also helping retrieve thousands of priceless art treasures, stolen by the Nazis.

Born in East View, N.Y., in 1907,  Frederick Charles Shrady was a son of American sculptor Henry Merwin Shrady, who created the Grant Memorial on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. He got his first taste of Connecticut when he attended the Choate School in Wallingford, graduating in 1928. He studied painting at the Art Students’ League in New York City, and then went to Oxford University in England where he graduated in 1931. 

That year, he moved to Paris  to paint and to study painting. Over nine years there, he gained

esteem as an artist and earned a medal at the 1937 Paris Exposition. His paintings are in museums in Paris, Lyons, Grenoble, Belgrade, and Zagreb. Before was 33, he had had solo exhibitions in Dublin, Paris, Belgrade, London, and New York.

Early in World War II, Shrady worked with the French underground — he was later awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.

 In July 1943 as war raged on, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, serving at first in the Model Making Division that created elaborate decoys. But he soon became involved in even more fascinating work:  As the war was ending, Lieutenant Shrady joined the Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) division (celebrated in the 2014 film, “The Monuments Men,” starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett).

According to the Monuments Men Foundation,  in June 1945 he was one of the team  that removed thousands of stolen art works, stored by the Nazis in a mine at Altaussee, Austria. Hitler had

collect them there for his planned “Fuhrermuseum” in Linz, Austria, a huge complex to showcase his plunder.  The Monuments Men were racing to rescue the art before the arrival of Russian troops who eventually took control of Austria. 

“Together, they carefully packed Michelangelo’s ‘Bruges Madonna,’ Vermeer’s ‘The Artist’s Studio,’ and the Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck,” the foundation said. “Shrady and the Monuments Men evacuated these great works of art, along with over 15,000 other works of art and cultural objects, to the Munich Central Collecting Point. In the following months, Shrady conducted inspections of churches, castles, and museums in Wiesbaden, Germany.”

It was while serving in Austria that he met his future wife, Maria Louise Likar-Waltersdorff, who had grown up in Vienna and was working as an interpreter for the Monuments Men. They married in 1946.

Back in the United States after the war, Shrady continued to paint and was turning more to religious subjects. In 1945, though he was an American Episcopalian, he had created a 14-foot high painting, “Descent from the Cross,” for St. Stephen’s Cathedral (‘Stephansdom’) in Vienna, as a gift from the U.S. Armed Forces to the church. He became the only American to have his art in this and several other major churches in Europe including a mural of St. Francis in the chapel of St. Francis in Paris and a painting of St. Christopher in the Dublin Cathedral.

     “I have a feeling for spiritual work,” Shrady once said in an interview.

     After he moved to Ridgefield in 1948 and converted to Catholicism, Shrady turned to the

medium of his father, taking up sculpture as virtually his only medium. His very first work, a bust of noted Jesuit philosopher Martin D’Arcy created in 1949, was so good, the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased it. (Father D’Arcy later wrote the introduction to Maria Shrady’s first book, “Come, Southwind,” written in Ridgefield and published in 1957.)

      Having the Met buy a “beginner’s” work would be a tremendous boost for any artist, and Shady quickly immersed himself in sculpture.

Around 1954, he created the altar statuary, 28 stained-glass windows, 14 painted stations of the cross, and many small windows symbolizing various saints for the new St. Lawrence O’Toole Church in Hartford. The altar art included a nine-foot figure of Jesus on a 16-foot high cross. Shrady said the only way he could see for himself how the figure would look was to have himself tied to a beam and then photographed, which he did.

Frederick and Maria lived on  the northern corner of Route 7 and New Road and belonged to St. Mary’s Parish. In 1956, as St. Mary’s was building its new Catholic school, Shrady set about creating 53 sculptures for the new building. His two youngest children were among the early St. Mary students.

In 1959 he and Maria and their children moved to Easton where Shrady had purchased a large stone mansion, built in the late 1930s by the American author Edna Ferber (his daughter Mary Louise Shrady Smith lives there today). 

Shrady had become a friend of many leaders in the Catholic church and among the guests at his Easton home in 1976 was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, secretary of state of the Vatican. The cardinal admired Shrady’s work and suggested he create a statue for the Vatican Gardens, a 16th Century papal retreat behind St. Peter’s Basilica that is usually closed to the public. Shrady liked the idea and five years later, when Cardinal Casaroli was again staying at his home, Shrady showed him a model for a statue of “Our Lady of Fatima” that he thought would be appropriate for the gardens. The model was shown to Pope John Paul II who approved the work, the first time an American artist had received a papal commission.

The 10-foot bronze statue was unveiled before the Pope in 1983 on the 66th anniversary of the apparition of Mary to three children at Fatima, Portugal. That date, May 13, was also the anniversary of two attempts to assassinate the Pope, in 1981 in Rome and 1982 at Fatima. “He is convinced that our lady of Fatima interceded for him,” Shrady told a reporter in 1984.

Among the handful of guests for the Pope’s blessing of the statue were Louise and Dan McKeon of Ridgefield, friends the Shradys and supporters of  Frederick’s work. “There we were, a small group, standing in the Vatican gardens with the Holy Father, and something we had all cared about and been involved in was finally being realized,” Louise McKeon said later. “It has been beautifully placed, under a well-pruned cedar of Lebanon.”

When the ceremony was over, “the Pope went up to the sculpture again and spoke with Mr. Shrady, bringing tears to the artist’s eyes,” McKeon recalled.

Among Shrady’s major works are:

• a statue of St. Elizabeth Seton in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York;
  
• a sculpture for the FBI headquarters in Washington that portrays fidelity, bravery and integrity;
  
• the 18-foot bronze Human Rights statue for the U.S. Mission at the United Nations;
  
• St. Peter the Fisherman casting his net, located at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
  
• 12 bas-relief panels, depicting “The Life of Mary,” for the doors of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, Israel.
  
• 14 Stations of the Cross in Georgetown University's Dahlgren Chapel (among the few paintings he did after becoming a sculptor).
  
• An 18-foot-high statue of St. Benedict the Moor, a black saint, erected atop a church tower on a hill overlooking a black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pa., and aimed at being a symbol of racial “healing and progress.” (Although the 3,000-pound statue is made of aluminum, it is so big that it required a large helicopter to lift it into place and it is so high that its stand had to be designed “like a bridge” to withstand hurricane-strength winds.)
  
• A statue of St. Francis at the Egan Chapel of Fairfield University.
  
• Three works, including “The Good Samaritan” and “Flame,” in the sculpture collection of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum.
  

One of his more unusual works was a huge bronze sculpture on the facade of St. Ann Chapel, an Anglican church near Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. The chapel was built by Ridgefielder Clare Boothe Luce in memory of her 19-year-old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, a student at Stanford killed in a 1944 automobile accident. Shrady’s sculpture on the building’s facade portrays Saint Ann and the Virgin Mary, with the mother (St. Ann) teaching her young daughter (the Virgin Mary) how to read.

Frederick Shrady died in 1990 at the age of 82. Maria, who died in 2002, was the author several books. In 1961 she won the Christopher Book Award for “In the Spirit of Wonder”; other works included “Moments of Insight” and “The Mother Teresa Story,” and translations of various religious writings. 

Mahonri Young: 

The Greatest Moment

Mahonri Young, a preeminent American sculptor of the 20th Century, was a month short of his 70th birthday when perhaps his most famous work was unveiled: A tribute to his grandfather, Brigham Young, on the centennial of his arrival at what was to become Salt Lake City.

“This is the greatest moment of my life,” Young said at the 1947 unveiling of the 60-foot monument outside Salt Lake City, Utah, attended by 75,000 people.

Yet only two months earlier, his beloved wife, Dorothy, daughter of American Impressionist artist J. Alden Weir, had died.

Mahonri Mackintosh Young was born in Salt Lake City in 1877, the same year his grandfather, Mormon leader Brigham Young, died. Twenty days after his birth, the infant Mahonri received the blessing of his grandfather, who was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the governor of Utah territory.

Brigham Young had led the Mormons to their promised land in the Salt Lake basin, where they founded the city. As their wagon train approached the the basin, Young was lying exhausted and burning up with fever in the last wagon. As he looked down into the valley, he said, “This is the place.”

A century later, his grandson Mahonri engraved those words atop the the famous “This Is the Place Monument”  — a huge work that was created in Ridgefield.

Mahonri Young grew up in Salt Lake City where he began his art studies with J. T. Harwood, a painter. He was hired as a sketcher for the Salt Lake Tribune and by 1899 had saved enough money to move to New York and enroll in the Art Students League, where he later taught. 

In 1901 he began studies at the Academie Julian in Paris and also traveled to Italy. In Europe he

met prominent personalities in the arts including Leo Stein, brother of Gertrude, who took him to Pablo Picasso’s first exhibit in a Parisian furniture store, and Ernest Hemingway, who admired his work. He also associated with Robert Henri and the Group of Eight, leaders of the Ash Can School of American realism (Henri painted the noted portrait of Ridgefield General David Perry, also profiled in Who Was Who).

Young gained international recognition when his work was exhibited at the Salon, the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. 

Like his Ridgefield friend, Frederic Remington, Young was, throughout his career, an exponent of the West. Many of his paintings, etchings and sculptures dealt with Indians, cowboys, horses, and other aspects of Western life.

However, he also created works connected with industrial workers and even prizefighters. “Man with a Pick” and “Stevedore” are bronze figures now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “Boxer” is at the Whitney Museum.

Young married Cecilia Sharp in 1907. She died ten years later of cancer. Although he had visited  artist J. Alden Weir in Ridgefield early in the 20th Century, Weir wasn’t exactly a catalyst in Young’s second marriage. “No matter how friendly Weir always was to us of the younger artists, he never introduced us to any of his three charming daughters,” Young said. “We never met any of them

until after he died. But it was no use. I married the most beautiful, the finest, the most talented of them, Dorothy.”

That was in 1931 and the next year, he moved to Weir’s farm in Ridgefield where he made his home much of the rest of his life and where he created hundreds of sketches and paintings of life at the farm, including scenes depicting animals, crops and farm laborers.

Soon after arriving Young built a studio behind the Weir homestead and next to his father-in-law’s, roomy enough to handle sizable sculptures and very bright, with large skylights. “At last I’ve got a studio large enough to do anything I want to do in paint or clay,” he said when it was finished. “If I ever have a big thing to do again, I will do it here even if I have to stay the whole winter.” The Young studio has been restored as part of the Weir Farm National Historic Site.

In 1939, he received the commission to create the big, centennial monument to his grandfather that would not be unveiled until eight years later. Most of the work on “This Is the Place” was done

in his Ridgefield studio.

In 1950, Young also created the sculpture that represents the state of Utah in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in Washington: It is a rendering of his grandfather.

Young’s works are also in the collections of many major museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Harvard Art Museum.

Skilled at painting, drawing, etching and sculpture, Young taught almost every subject in the curriculum at the Art Students League, said Dr. Thomas E. Toone, author of the 1997 biography, “Mahonri Young: His Life and Art.” 

Both this and 1999 biography, “A Song of Joys: The Biography of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, Sculptor, Painter, Etcher,” by Norma S. Davis, point out that despite his ancestry and upbringing, Young was not a participating member of Mormon church. “He liked cigars and wine and he found it humorous when he had to go to church twice in one day,” said Dr. Todd A. Britsch, a Brigham Young University reviewer of both books. Nonetheless, he was devoted “to his Mormon heritage and friends.”

Young died in 1957 at the age of 80 and is buried in Salt Lake City.