Charles M. Russell and the End of the Beginning

Charles M. Russell’s (1864-1926) watercolors offer a window into the movement of peoples and animals over the vastnesses of the American West, even as those vastnesses shrank before the insistent shouldering of the urban East and the increasingly industrial Midwest.

Born into relative comfort as the Civil War was coming to a close, young Charlie Russell’s hometown, St. Louis, was the bustling gateway to the West, borderland between “civilization” and the rapidly filling “frontier.” Never much for formal education, the people and horses that lit out for the open range captured Russell’s imagination, while his mother’s aptitude for painting flowers—in watercolor—planted the seed that would become a vocation. Still in his teens, Russell convinced his parents to allow him to head West and try his hand at punching cows. He did and made a go of it even as he made fast friends among the characters of the Montana Territory’s Judith Basin. He began to try to capture cowboy life in art—in watercolor. Russell’s work was being published regularly in Harper’s Weekly even before he married Nancy Cooper in 1896. But Nancy took responsibility for the business end of Russell’s art and proved to be shrewd agent. A career was born.

What drew Russell at first to the medium of watercolor was that materials and instruction manuals were available and portable. Its widespread popularity, coupled with the rising industry of materials and art instruction for amateurs, helped make it possible for him to work in the medium. Moreover, watercolor paints and paper and books went where he went, right in the saddlebag. Watercolor was a nomad’s medium.

Early on, Russell painted realistic depictions of the adventure of range life. But the Old West was already receding into history. Russell receded with it. The journalist became the bard. The chronicler became the mythmaker. Russell shares this trajectory with Remington, though he would accept it more fully than Remington. Russell’s body of work thus becomes a single sagebrush saga, an epic of wandering, crisscrossing, clashing tribes of nomads: Indians, cowboys, vaqueros. Artworks rise out of the whole cloth of his mind, memory, imagination, fashioning a single entity of the fabric of the West. What he witnessed wasn’t, to him, merely the loss of the story of the West, but the loss of the beginning of the story of humankind, the loss of a kind of Genesis.

For Russell, the mythical legendary Old West isn’t simple nostalgia, it’s a spiritual vocation to illustrate a parallel history, a story at odds with the notions of progress that dominate Western civilization at the turn of the 19th century.

We look at Russell and say, “That Charlie, what a character. He knew what he was doing.” There’s nothing wrong with that. We see him as he saw his West, unique and sufficient unto itself. He probably would have wanted that—to remain easy, approachable, and folksy. For the most part, his wish has been granted. And that’s how it is. But only at first.

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