A FREDERIC REMINGTON FOR TODAY

The Fight For the Water Hole — a narrative image that became a staple in Western movies.  The painting dates from 1903, the year of the wildly popular short film The Great Train Robbery, a Western, which helped establish the story film as the dominant genre of cinema.  This was the era when the mythic iconography of the Old West was becoming codified.  Coincidentally or not, the coda of the Coen brothers' True Grit is set in 1903.