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My favorite Western Art
(1864-1926) Montana's most famous artist, and, along with Frederic Remington, one of the two most famous artists ever to paint the West - was born in St. Louis, Missouri on March 19, 1864. He came to Montana in 1880, at the age of 16, just four years after Custer's fatal last stand at the Little Big Horn. His first job in Montana was sheepherder - and he was terrible at it. "I'd lose the damn things as fast as they put 'em on the ranch," he said later. Fired from that job, he helped professional meat hunter, Jake Hoover, spending about two years learning about Indians, wildlife, and Montana's past.
In 1882 he went to work as a cowboy, working as night wrangler on cattle drives and round-ups. During the bitter cold winter of 1886-1887, Charlie was staying on the O.H. Ranch. In a reply to the owners of the ranch who asked about the condition of their herd, Charlie drew a sketch of a gaunt, starving cow surrounded by wolves, and titled it "Waiting for a Chinook" The sketch was reproduced in the Montana newspapers, and is still today one of Charlie's best-known pictures.
During his days on the range, Charlie always had a sketch pad and some brushes with him, and occasionally he tried to make his living as an artist. But he always went back to working as a cowboy, saying he'd "rather be a poor cow puncher than a poor artist." But in 1896 his situation turned around. He married a pretty young girl named Nancy Cooper, and as soon as she took over the business end of his art career, things began to look up. Within just a few years Nancy was charging collectors what Charlie always called "dead man's prices."
Charlie Russell died on October 24, 1926, of heart failure, and he was deeply mourned by the entire state of Montana. In Great Falls, city offices and schools were closed on the day of his funeral. His first roundup boss, Horace Brewster, told the newspaper, "He never swung a mean loop in his life, never done dirt to man or animal, in all the days he lived."
(1861-1909) Born in Canton, New York, near the Canadian border, Remington grew up in a near-wilderness region, and became an avid hunter and horseman. His father, a Republican newspaper publisher and politician, had been an officer in the Civil War, and thereby cast a heroic shadow which Remington strove to match. The boy was no lover of academic studies, and because of modest artistic abilities, after he had struggled through public, private, and military schools, he elected to enter the School of Arts at Yale in 1878, where he excelled more at sports than in painting, playing football under the captaincy of the famous Walter Camp. The artistic training he received during the two years at Yale helped move him out of the amateur ranks; still, it would be the life he led thereafter that provided Remington his material.
He was primarily an illustrator, working for many magazines such as Harper's Weekly and Outing. In the Spanish-American War he served as a war correspondent and artist.
Artists in America during the 19th century depicted Indians in their paintings, concerned with describing their appearances, customs and ways of life. They also presented the best-known images of Western life. The most important painters of this time, Frederick Remington and Charles Marion Russell, were technically accurate and also sensational. They represented scenes of cowboys and Indians, gamblers, gunfighters, saloons and all the paraphernalia of the Hollywood Western.
During the last twenty years of his life he executed a powerful series of twenty-four bronzes to great success, which also helped raise Remington to a position of real significance in the history of 19th-century American art. His first, "Bronco Buster" (1895, one casting in New-York Historical Society, New York City) displays the vigor and sense of movement of his paintings. His subsequent bronzes, such as "Comin' Through the Rye" (1902, Metropolitan Museum), in which four cowhands on horseback charge at the observer in glee, are daring for their technical skill in suspending large figures on slim supports, in this case on the hooves of the horses. Among the books he wrote and illustrated are "Pony Tracks" (1895), "Crooked Trails" (1898), and "The Way of an Indian" (1906).
Remington died suddenly in his studio home in New Rochelle, New York, from the effects of appendicitis. During his life he had produced nearly 3,000 paintings.
Frederic Remington, On the Southern Plains, 1907
Frederic Remington, Among the led horses, 1909
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