The Emigrants

The Emigrants at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston depicts the westward migration of settler families that was among the great subjects of American nineteenth-century historical painting and illustration. Remington approached it from a documenter's perspective rather than a mythologising one: his emigrant parties travel through real-looking landscape under difficult conditions, their horses and wagons showing the strain of the journey. By 1904 the frontier was officially closed, and paintings like this participated in the retrospective mythologisation of a process already past. The MFA Houston holds a substantial collection of American Western art.

A group of emigrants in motion required Remington to manage multiple figures, animals, and vehicles across a landscape. He structures the composition through the direction of movement, using overlapping forms and a strong horizon to convey the sense of a column moving through space.