Frederic Remington – The Broncho Buster Mug

Frederic Remington (1861–1909) was twenty-five years old when he first travelled to the American West, and the experience transformed him. He returned repeatedly over the following two decades, working as a painter, illustrator, and — in the final years of his career — sculptor, to record a way of life he sensed was disappearing. The Broncho Buster, cast in 1895, was his first bronze and remains his most celebrated work: a cowboy on a rearing horse, the rider leaning back against the animal's momentum, hat raised, the composition spiralling upward in a controlled explosion of energy. Remington solved the considerable technical challenge of balancing the bronze on two rear hooves by concentrating weight at the base and using the horse's tail as a third point of support.

The sculpture entered the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has since been cast in numerous editions; copies have occupied the Oval Office of the White House under several administrations, lending it a peculiar double life as both fine art and political symbol. For Remington, the work was personal — an act of preservation as much as invention, made at the moment when the frontier he had documented was being absorbed into national mythology. The image reproduced here — bold, kinetic, resolved in silhouette — captures the bronze as it was meant to be seen: from below, against the sky.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Frederic Remington, The Broncho Buster, 1895, bronze. Public domain.