The Last Cast
A TazzArte tribute to America at 250 — July 4, 2026
On the last day of 1918, a foundry in New York recorded number 214 in its ledger and closed the book on Frederic Remington’s most famous bronze. A century later, America turns 250 — and the cowboy on the rearing horse is still the country’s most recognizable self-portrait.
Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895, cast 1918. Bronze. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.
The date in the Roman Bronze Works ledger is December 31, 1918. The entry is brief: cast number 214, The Broncho Buster, by Frederic Remington. It was the last one. Remington had died nine years earlier, at forty-eight, felled by appendicitis at his Connecticut home on the winter solstice of 1909. His wife Eva had kept the edition going in the years that followed, but by the final day of the war year, the molds were spent. Number 214 was done.
That particular casting — significant precisely because it is the last — now sits in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession number 1986.81.2, bequeathed by Helen R. Bleibtreu in 1985. It measures twenty-two and three-quarter inches tall: a cowboy on a rearing horse, the rider leaning back against the animal’s momentum, hat raised, one hand gripping the reins, the other thrown wide. The horse’s rear hooves carry the full weight of the composition. The tail provides a third point of support — a technical solution as elegant as the sculpture itself.
Detail of cast number 214 — the last recorded in the Roman Bronze Works ledger. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. No. 1986.81.2. Public domain.
Remington was twenty-five when he first went West. He returned many times, working as a painter and illustrator for Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s, recording a frontier he sensed was already disappearing even as he drew it. By 1895, when he copyrighted The Broncho Buster, the Indian Wars were over, the railroads had crossed the continent, and Frederick Jackson Turner had already declared, in his famous 1893 address, that the American frontier was closed. Remington’s bronzes were not documentation. They were elegy.
The irony is that the image survived its subject. The Broncho Buster became the most reproduced sculpture in American history. Editions have sat in the Oval Office under multiple administrations — a bipartisan talisman, apparently, for presidents who wished to align themselves with the mythology of the open range. The figure Remington cast in 1895, adapted from a drawing published in Harper’s Weekly three years earlier under the title “Pitching Broncho,” became, over the following century, the visual shorthand for something America wanted to believe about itself: self-reliant, kinetic, unafraid of the rearing horse.
At 250 years, that self-image is worth examining.
The United States that declared its independence in 1776 was a collection of thirteen coastal settlements with a contested claim to a continent it had not yet crossed. The country that celebrates its semiquincentennial in 2026 is something Remington could not have imagined — and something that has been shaped, in ways both celebrated and contested, by the myth of the West he helped create. The cowboy on the rearing horse is not a neutral image. It never was. But it is a deeply American one, and anniversaries are the right moment to look at the images a nation has chosen for itself and ask what they mean.
The Met’s cast number 214 sits in its glass case on Fifth Avenue and offers no answers. It does not have to. Remington never claimed to be making arguments. He was making images — urgent, physical, resolved in silhouette — for a country that needed them.
The Broncho Buster – America 250 Jubilee Edition. Tazzarte, 2026.
For its America 250 Jubilee Edition, Tazzarte has reproduced the Broncho Buster on fine porcelain: the full figure, photographed in the high-contrast black-and-white that captures the bronze as Remington intended it to be seen, the form reading clearly against the light. The mug carries the America 250 ribbon — the same awareness-ribbon motif in the colors of the flag — as a small acknowledgment that this is an anniversary piece, made in the year the country completes its first two and a half centuries.
It is not a collector’s object in the sense of something to be displayed and not touched. It is ten ounces of fine porcelain, dishwasher and microwave safe, made to be picked up and used. There is something fitting about that. Remington made his bronzes to be handled. The statuettes were produced in editions precisely because he wanted them in people’s homes, not only in museums. Cast number 214 ended up at the Met. The other 213 went elsewhere — into offices, onto mantlepieces, into the daily life of a country that found in the cowboy on the rearing horse something it recognized as itself.
The last cast is at Fifth Avenue. This one is for the table.
The Broncho Buster – America 250 Jubilee Edition is available now at Tazzarte. Fine Porcelain, 10 oz.
Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895, cast 1918. Bronze, 22¾ × 18¾ × 14 in. Bequest of Helen R. Bleibtreu, 1985. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acc. No. 1986.81.2. View in the Met collection. Public domain.