Remington's nocturnes. (Books About Antiques).

Frederic Remington: The Color of Night, by Nancy K. Anderson with contributions by Williams C. Sharpe and Alexander Nemerov (National Gallery of Art with Princeton University Press, 800-777-4726), $49.95 (hardcovers).

Frederic Remington first went west in 1881 at the age of twenty-one and from an artistic point of view he never left. The soon-to-be mythical frontier of cowboys and Indians, cavalry and covered wagons remained his subject in magazine illustrations, novels, sculptures, and paintings until his premature death in 1909.

The nocturnes were preceded by the painter's experience of the Spanish-American War, which he went to observe as a correspondent, saying that "the greatest thing which men are called on to do" is military combat. His father had been a famous soldier, and so the artist approached the war with equanimity. The result was quite the reverse, for in the end he wrote: "all the broken spirits, bloody bodies, hopeless, helpless suffering which drags its length to the rear, are so much more appalling than anything else in the world that words won't mean anything to one who has not seen it." Then, in 1900, he wrote to his wife from New Mexico that the West today "is all brick buildings--derby hats and blue overhauls--it spoils my early illusions--and they are my capital." It is in this chastened and disillusioned frame of mind that he turned to his nocturnal paintings, in which narratives are begun but not finished, questions are asked but not answered, danger is sensed but not seen, silence is ominous, and the threat o f death is omnipresent.

Having failed as a sheep rancher and saloonkeeper he made his name as an illustrator, although he wanted above all to be remembered as a painter. He only really achieved this ambition in the last decade of his life with some seventy nocturnal paintings of the kinds of western subjects he painted earlier in daylight The nocturnes are the subject of this book, which accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.

One of the essays that precede the catalogue of the paintings situates Remington among other painters of darkness such as James McNeill Whistler, Washington Allston, Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Pinitham Ryder, and Winslow Homer, another essay evaluates the parallel development of electricity, the photographic flash, and Remington's nocturnes.

The catalogue of the seventy-two works provides, in addition to dimensions, inscriptions, and so forth, relevant excerpts from Remington's diary and selected reviews. It is followed by an admirably technical chapter about his materials and techniques and details of the conservation so far accomplished on some ...