“Invocation to the Sun”, oil on canvas, 1922.

Why Charlie Russell is the Most Influential Western Artist of All Time

Charles Marion Russell, also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and “Kid” Russell, was an American artist of the Old American West. Russell created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Indians, and landscapes set in the Western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. Known as the “cowboy artist” because he was both a cowboy and an artist, Russell was also a storyteller, author, historian, advocate of Native Americans, cowboy, outdoorsman, philosopher, environmentalist, and conservationist.

Russell, left, in 1887. Courtesy of the Charles M. Russell Research Collection, Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Born on March 19, 1864, in St. Louis, Missouri, art was always a part of Russell’s life. Growing up in Missouri, he drew sketches and made clay figures of animals. Russell had an intense interest in the “wild west,” dreamed of becoming a cowboy and living the exciting life of men on the range, and would spend hours reading about it. Russell would watch explorers and fur traders who frequently came through Missouri. He learned to ride horses at Hazel Dell Farm near Jerseyville, Illinois, on a famous Civil War horse named Great Britain. Russell’s instructor was Col. William H. Fulkerson, who had married into the Russell family. At the age of sixteen, Russell left school and went to Montana to work on a sheep ranch to try his hand as a cowpuncher.

After a brief, unsuccessful stint, Russell left the sheep ranch and found work with Jake Hoover, a hunter and trapper who had become a rancher and who owned land in the Judith Basin. Russell learned much about the ways of the West from Hoover, and the two men remained lifelong friends. After a brief visit in 1882 to his family in Missouri, Russell returned to Montana, and lived and worked there for the remainder of his life.

A cowboy artist who was both a cowboy and an artist

He worked as a cowboy for a number of outfits, and documented the harsh winter of 1886–1887 in a number of watercolors. Russell was working on the O-H Ranch in the Judith Basin of Central Montana at the time. This was the perfect job for the young artist because it gave him the opportunity…