Published: Tuesday, 4 February 2025

You know what is fascinating about bronze casting? An artist's vision can be endlessly reproduced yet never exactly duplicated— each copy that emerges from the cast mold is both identical yet subtly different from all previous copies. In a world of identikit fashion, digitally replicated goods and formulaic music, it is refreshing to examine a medium where exact conformity is impossible.

The recent Christie's auction of 19th Century American and Western Art shows how bronze casting is a popular art form from that era. I can't help but see the parallel between the molding process and the mythology of the American West—a story cast and recast, each telling both authentic and altered, a narrative endlessly reproduced yet never exactly duplicated... N. Scott Momaday captured this perfectly when he observed, "The West is a landscape that needs to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen."

Having spent considerable time in the Mountain West of the United States —where you can watch the tension between authentic Western heritage and Instagram-ready Cosplay Cowboys grind out in real time—I'm struck by how these artworks aren't just preserving history: they're actively shaping how we understand the West. Today, we are going to focus on bronze casting and how this specific type of art helped create the identity and imagery we associate with the American West.

All of these themes converge in my favorite piece: Remington's Mountain Man bronze statue. I've been obsessed with mountain men since my 4th grade social studies class in Utah. Seeing how Frederic Remington captured their essence in bronze just hits different. Between 1850-1925, bronze statues became the go-to medium for immortalising Western icons—and there's a reason for that.

Themes of the American West

Western art crystallised around several distinct themes: the sublime drama of untamed landscapes, the tenuous thread of civilisation represented by the military and wagon trains, the complex dynamics between Native Americans and settlers, and the daily struggles of frontier life. These themes transcend mere documentation to explore fundamental aspects of human nature: the drive to explore, the tension between civilisation and wilderness, and the cost of progress. To further promote this vision, individuals and their personalities were promoted to encourage the population to personally adopt Manifest Destiny, and glorify the agenda for future generations.

The mythologising of Western figures occurred almost in real-time: Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanche, became a symbol of Native American adaptation to white society; Buffalo Bill transformed from frontier scout to international showman; and figures like Annie Oakley were marketed as living embodiments of Western skill and independence. This commodification of Western identity wasn't just a later development—Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was already packaging and selling the Western experience while the frontier was still being settled, creating a feedback loop between reality and representation that continues to shape our understanding of the era.

Each artistic medium contributed distinctly to the Western narrative: painters like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt created sublime landscapes that suggested divine approval of expansion, political cartoonists provided visual propaganda for Manifest Destiny, and sculptors, particularly through the permanence of bronze, transformed fleeting frontier moments into enduring monuments. Bronze sculpture, with its ability to be both reproduced and subtly altered, became the perfect medium for an era whose history was simultaneously being preserved and reinvented.

Not all that glitters is bronze (but when it does…)

Before Frederic Remington began immortalising the West in his bronze works, he made many illustrations of life, stories, and scenes from the American West. But when he started casting pieces like Bronco Buster, The Cheyenne, Coming through the Rye, and The Rattlesnake something magical happened. President Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Remington, once said "The soldier, the cowboy and rancher, the Indian, the horses and the cattle of the plains, will live in his pictures and bronzes, I verily believe, for all time," ... Teddy Roosevelt was many things, including, apparently, a romantic?

Bronze casts became popular partly due to their durability, which adapted better to the harsh weather conditions of the region. That durability led to a sense of permanence, which was comforting in a time of dramatic change. The material also provides the ability to capture detail and a sense of movement, which was another social and economic feature of the time. Bronze cast statues are also (relatively!) easily molded and manipulated (like the stories they promote and sell...).

Lost-Wax Process

The lost-wax process is the most popular technique to make sculptures. It involves creating a mold from a wax model and then pouring molten metal into the mold. While the process is primarily for metal casting, it can also be used for glass sculptures. Let’s walk through the steps of this process:

• Model: An artist carves a design out of wax, every detail you can imagine.
• Create a mold: The wax model is encased with a mold material, like plaster.
• Remove the wax: The plaster mold goes into the kiln, the wax model beneath the plaster melts away (hence 'lost-wax'), leaving behind a perfect negative space.
• Pour the metal: The mold is placed in a kiln and molten metal, bronze in this case, is poured into the cavity.
• Cool and remove: Once the metal has cooled, the mold is removed to reveal the casting.
• Finish: The casting is filed, ground, machined, or sandblasted to achieve the desired shape and finish.

Even with all of these considerations, multiple components can contribute to differences in bronze sculptures produced from wax molds. These include mold modifications, the quality of the mold, pouring technique, bronze temperature, and patina application. Each of these steps leaves its own subtle mark on the final piece, which is why no two casts are the same.

There are two primary versions of the lost-wax method: direct and indirect. The direct method is cheaper and faster, but there are two important disadvantages: first, if, for any reason, the casting failed then the wax model—the sculptor’s entire work—was lost forever. Second, even if the casting was successful, only one bronze could be produced from a sculptor’s model.

Therefore, the important innovation for repeated production came from the indirect method. This is more time-consuming and expensive, because it requires the creation of an 'intermodel', made of a more durable material (originally clay or plaster, then rubber, and more recently plastic). Once the intermodel is created, the artist can make numerous sculptures from the same mold (although, as mentioned above, the imperfections in the process still mean that the final pieces are not completely identical, even if they are from the same mold). Indirect casting permits the sculptor to produce numerous bronze replicas of a popular model, like the Mountain Man.

Remington was a habitual revisionist when it came to his dynamic bronze renditions, so the ability to make minor adjustments and tweaks to his molds before the casting process became essential to his practice.

The Mountain Man

With Mountain Man, Remington captured a masterclass in horsemanship. Anyone who's ever ridden in rough country knows that descending steep terrain is one of the scariest things you can do on horseback. It takes complete trust between horse and rider, the kind that only comes from countless hours in the saddle. This piece shows a seasoned mountain man with his equally experienced mount moving through terrain. Trust is displayed as the mountain man looks onward, not down at his steed; he is confident in his horse's ability to navigate the descent.

Details are rearranged, positioned differently, or removed entirely. The left statue has an additional rope instead of traps that wraps around the horse's neck, while the fluid reins and whip (instead of a crop) create a sweeping, almost balletic quality. It speaks more to showmanship—it's more dramatic, more theatrical, like something you'd see in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The right statue is probably more consistent with survival and how a mountain man would navigate this descent in reality. The arm is braced against the horse's rump to not tumble head first into oblivion. The satchel and powder horn are positioned for quick access rather than aesthetic appeal. Even the horse's tail tells a different story—one version frozen in a classic pose, the other capturing the actual physics of a horse navigating treacherous terrain.

The museum's version (left statue) is an earlier cast. Christie's piece (right statue) came later near the end of his life. Some differences are clearly intentional— a result of Remington's obsessive refinements—while others are what I like to call 'bronze serendipity': variations that happen when molten metal meets different temperatures, patinas react slightly differently, when time itself leaves its mark on the process. Observe the difference in this other model of the Mountain Man below, in particular the rifle and horse's back leg.

Only 8-15 casts were made while Remington was alive to oversee them. Today, there are an estimated 74 casts out there. Each one tells us something about how we've chosen to remember—and reimagine—the West. It's a bit like oral histories passed down through generations; the core remains, but the details shift with each telling. This is something to consider if you're ever in the market for a Remington bronze.

Conclusion: Legacy and Reflection

As my father likes to joke… ‘it is a metaphor!’ And he's right—Remington's Mountain Man isn't just a bronze statue; it's a perfect embodiment of how Western mythology itself was created, reproduced, and modified. Roosevelt wasn't wrong about the staying power of Remington's work, though perhaps not for the reasons he thought. There's an undeniable energy in these pieces that transcends their role as mere historical documents. Even as we acknowledge the darker undertones of Western expansion and its artistic glorification, we can't help but be moved by the raw power of these works.

Like those bronze castings we've been examining, each new interpretation of the West both preserves and alters the original. There's something magical about how this brief moment in American history—only thirty years—left such an indelible mark on America's national identity. The rugged individualism, the pioneer spirit, the raw survival instinct: these aren't just artistic themes, they're part of how America sees itself today, for better or worse.

Historians sometimes say the period of European expansion in the 15th-17th Centuries was driven by the 'three G's': Glory, Gold, and God. America's westward push had its own trinity: Conquest, Cattle, and Creed. But I'd argue there's a fourth C we should add: Casting. Each version both authentic and altered, both true and mythological. And maybe that's exactly what makes it so quintessentially American.

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