Frederic Remington, Moonlight, Wolf, c. 1909, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Gift of the Members of the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Addison Gallery
In another late work, Remington created an image that destroyed the comforting distance viewers might have felt when considering the grim implications of such paintings as The Luckless Hunter. In Moonlight, Wolf Remington succeeded in turning the viewer into potential prey. Isolated at the center of the canvas, a lone wolf stares with narrowed eyes into the viewer’s space. Frozen in its tracks, the wolf appears to have heard an alarming sound. There is, however, no agent within the painting for the wolf to act upon. Instead, the fixated eyes of Remington’s wolf engage the viewer and cast that individual as either the source of the animal’s alarm or the object of its attack. The threat of danger, an element present in nearly all of Remington’s nocturnes, is now directed out, toward the viewer.
