Modern Age
Charles M. Russell (1864–1926)
American Art of the Old West painter.
Charles Marion Russell — "Charlie" Russell, the "cowboy artist" — was the great self-taught painter of the American Old West. Born in St. Louis in 1864 to a well-off family, he was a restless boy obsessed with the frontier, and at sixteen he lit out for Montana Territory. He spent the 1880s as a working wrangler and night herder in the Judith Basin, learning the open range from the saddle in the last years before barbed wire and homesteaders closed it. He sketched and modeled figures in wax the whole time, and a small watercolor sent to a foreman during the brutal winter of 1886–87 — a starving steer ringed by wolves — spread his name across the territory.
In 1897 he settled in Great Falls, Montana, where his wife and manager Nancy Cooper Russell built him into a national figure, placing his oils with Eastern dealers and pressing his prices ever higher. His mature paintings are crowded, sunlit, and exact: cowboys roping and busting broncs, buffalo herds fording the Missouri, and — above all — the Plains tribes, whom he painted with a sympathy and specificity rare for his time and called the country's first and rightful owners. He is the western counterpart to Frederic Remington, the two of them the paired chroniclers of the frontier, though Russell alone had actually lived the cowboy life he pictured.
Russell was also a natural writer and humorist. His tall tales, published as Trails Plowed Under (1927), and his wonderful illustrated letters, gathered as Good Medicine (1929), record a man mourning a West that had vanished within his own lifetime. He died in Great Falls in 1926, by then the most beloved artist the region had produced.
The words the record keeps using: vigorous, authentic, nostalgic, plainspoken, elegiac, humorous, rugged.
At a glance
- Lived 1864–1926
- Origin American
- Worked in Great Falls, Montana, St. Louis, Missouri
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Art of the Old West
- Mediums Oil on canvas, Watercolor
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Oil sketch (modello)
Works in the archive
- The Cinch Ring, 1909 (American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection, Denver)
On the dry open range, cowboys throw and hold a struggling animal with taut ropes, a saddled horse rearing in the churned dust between them. The title names the heated cinch ring rustlers used to alter brands, and the… - In Without Knocking, 1909 (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth)
A crew of cowboys on a spree rides right up onto the boardwalk and in through the door of the Hoffman Hotel, pistols firing into the air, one horse crashed to its knees, playing cards and a dropped bottle strewn in the… - Lewis and Clark Meeting the Flathead Indians at Ross' Hole, 1912 (Montana State Capitol, Helena)
Russell's grandest work, the mural painted for the Montana House of Representatives, showing the 1805 meeting of the Lewis and Clark expedition with the Salish (Flathead) people in the Bitterroot Valley. Tellingly, the… - When the Land Belonged to God, 1914 (Montana Historical Society, Helena)
A herd of buffalo climbs a bluff above the Missouri River at dawn, breath and river-mist rising around them, while wolves shadow the fringe and bleached bones lie in the foreground grass. The title says it plainly: this…
What was said
In the tall tales and reminiscences gathered as Trails Plowed Under, Russell looked back on the open-range West he had ridden as a young cowboy and mourned its passing, casting his life's work as a record of a frontier that had vanished within his own lifetime.
Across the illustrated letters gathered in Good Medicine, Russell wrote of the Plains tribes with a respect unusual for his era, regarding the Native peoples as the country's first and rightful inhabitants and depicting their life with sympathy rather than caricature.
Russell maintained that he painted the West from having lived it — years of wrangling and night-herding in the Judith Basin — working from memory and a plainspoken firsthand authority rather than from posed studio models, the same voice that animates his stories.
Lineage
Learned from George Catlin, Frederic Remington
What would Charles make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Charles M. Russell", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Charles · Keep a life moment the way Charles would · Pictures made after Charles