ART

The spurs on the bronze cowboy sculpture “The Rattlesnake,” by Western artist Frederic Remington, are upside down, a St. Louis museum visitor said this week. “There’s no way a cowboy would wear his spurs pointing up like that,” said Cy Baumgartner, a former rodeo cowboy who drives a beer truck and raises quarter horses. “It would be totally out of character.” Baumgartner, who was touring the Remington exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum, apparently was the first to notice the error. A closer look also found that the spurs on all four horsemen in a casting of “Coming Through the Rye” were also upside down. Peter H. Hassrick, one of the curators of the exhibit, said he has occasionally noticed similar problems with Remington works in private collections but hadn’t noticed anything wrong in the St. Louis exhibit. How could Remington, who died in 1909, make such a goof? He probably didn’t, Hassrick said, explaining that the spurs and other small pieces were cast separately from the main work and affixing them to the sculpture was sometimes left to a foundry worker, who probably had little knowledge of a cowboy’s gear.