About Charles Marion Russell
Charles Marion Russell — also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell — was an American artist of the American Old West.
Born on March 19, 1864, he died on October 24, 1926.
He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, dreaming of living the life of a cowboy, and at sixteen, he acted on that dream — arriving in the Judith Basin of central Montana just days after his sixteenth birthday to try his hand as a cowpuncher.
He worked as a cowboy and wrangler for eleven years before retiring in 1893 to become a full-time artist.
Largely self-taught, Russell is recognized as one of the primary artists who crafted the iconography of the American West, working fluidly across oils, watercolors, and bronze sculpture to produce a body of work that is simultaneously documentary and deeply personal.
Russell produced about 4,000 works of art, including oil and watercolor paintings, drawings, and sculptures in wax, clay, plaster, and other materials, some of which were also cast in bronze. His most celebrated paintings include *Waiting for a Chinook* — a postcard-sized watercolor begun as a reply to a ranch owner asking how the cattle had weathered the brutal winter, depicting a gaunt steer watched by wolves under a gray winter sky, which the owner displayed in a shop window in Helena, Montana — and his 1912 mural *Lewis and Clark Meeting Indians at Ross' Hole*, which hangs in the House chambers of the Montana Capitol in Helena.
His works helped cultivate the Western myth and romanticized the icons of the American frontier — the cowboy, the buffalo, and the Indian — while revealing an empathy for the plight of Native American tribes that was extraordinarily progressive at the time.
Beginning in 1888, Russell spent a period living with the Blood Indians, a branch of the Blackfeet nation, and scholars believe he gained much of his intimate knowledge of Native American culture during this period.
His body of work set the precedent for future generations of Western artists, and his influence can be traced through countless painters, sculptors, and illustrators who followed in his wake.
About this work
The searches confirm that Russell's painting depicting a battle specifically between the **Crow and Blackfeet** is the 1895 oil painting *"For Supremacy"* — and this aligns strongly with the title "Battle Between the Crows and Blackfeet." I have enough verified, specific detail to write the product description.
Russell's *Battle Between the Crows and Blackfeet* — known in auction records as *For Supremacy* (1895) — is an oil on canvas measuring 23⅛ by 35 inches, depicting a clash between Blackfeet and Crow warriors on the open Northern Plains. The canvas erupts with movement: mounted warriors peel away toward the edges of the frame while the eye is drawn inexorably to the center, where a dismounted war chief stands beside his wounded black horse as an enemy warrior charges past on a striking white horse — a one-on-one duel that holds the picture together, imposing order on chaos and rendering the battle's furious action coherent. The palette is sun-bleached and dusty, the ochres and earth tones of the plains interrupted by the flash of war regalia and the muscular blacks and whites of the horses. There is nothing decorative about the light here — it is the hard, flat brightness of a Montana afternoon, and it makes everything feel immediate and unavoidable.
Painted in 1895, *For Supremacy* demonstrates Russell's growing technical skills and his natural gift for portraying "vivid and revealing action."
Russell greatly admired the Northern Plains Indians and closely observed their ways during the summer of 1888, when he lived near the camps of the Blackfeet, Piegan, and Blood Indians in Alberta, Canada — an experience reflected in the many detailed works he created of Plains Indian life.
As Russell historian Rick Stewart has noted, Russell was keenly interested in the life and culture of the Northern Plains Indians, gathering stories and narratives concerning intertribal warfare throughout his life, and a running battle between rival war parties was among his favorite subjects — one that let him show men and horses at the height of desperate, wild action.
The Blackfoot Nation warred with other major Native American groups, including the Sioux, the Crow, and the Northern Shoshone — and Russell's rendering carries the weight of that real history rather than merely its spectacle.
This is a painting that commands a wall rather than decorating one. It belongs in a space with room to breathe: a wide hallway, a great room, a study with dark wood and natural light. The colors are skillfully layered to suggest the flash and glow of light, and the quick, fluid energy in the work contributes to a sense of immediacy and vibrancy.
Russell sought to convey the adventure and danger of Indian life on the northern plains, before the arrival of the white man altered it forever — and that sense of an irretrievable moment gives the painting its particular gravity. It speaks to the viewer who wants something that
