The Wounded Bunkie

Frederic Remington

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The soldiers who patrolled the frontier during the Indian Wars became familiar heroes in art and literature about 1900. "The Wounded Bunkie" depicts two troopers retreating from an unseen combatant. An enemy bullet has pierced the torso of one; only the outstretched arm of his bunkmate, or "bunkie," keeps him upright. Remington makes a poignant statement about unflinching valor and brotherly bonds while invigorating the life-and-death narrative with complex arrested motion in which only two of the horses’ eight hooves meet the base. Lifetime casts were produced by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, which used the sand-cast method. This example, which x-radiography confirms is a lost-wax cast, is a posthumous cast, presumably done by Roman Bronze Works after 1921, when Remington’s original models were destroyed.

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art