Nothing But Cheerful Looks Followed the Bat

Frederic Remington · c. 1900

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

68.9 × 102.2 cm (27 1/8 × 40 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Nothing But Cheerful Looks Followed the Bat captures the quiet drama Remington brought to the American West at night — figures dissolving into shadow, the landscape rendered in cool, atmospheric blues that feel almost cinematic. By 1900, Frederic Remington had become one of America's most celebrated painters of western life, but it was his nocturnes that revealed the depth of his technical ambition. Where his contemporaries avoided painting darkness, Remington studied it obsessively, working out how moonlight flattened colour and softened edge. His brushwork in these later oils grew looser and more confident, drawing him closer to the Impressionists than to the illustrative precision that had made his early reputation. Remington produced dozens of nocturnal canvases in the final decade of his life, telling friends he considered them his most serious artistic achievement — a view now shared by many art historians who see these night pictures as his lasting contribution to American painting. The hand-painted oil reproduction brings that same tonal restraint and atmospheric depth to your wall, rendered in traditional oils on canvas by a skilled artist working directly from the original held at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is as close as you can get to owning a piece of Remington's nocturnal world.