The Charge [A Cavalry Scrap]

In 1906, the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York City commissioned artist Frederic Remington to paint a largescale work for its inauguration. "The Charge" (Remington’s largest painting) served as a monument to the tenacity of the frontiersman, theatrically depicted mid-battle. But Remington took equal delight in the musculature of the galloping horses—evidence of the artist’s awareness of recent photographic studies of horses in motion. The artist periodically traveled westward from his Brooklyn home to satisfy East Coast curiosity for tales of the American West, returning with images that helped shape popular notions of the “Wild West.” As the backdrop to the hotel’s lively Grille Room, this teeming panorama provided an exotic parallel to the hubbub of the hotel’s moneyed crowd.