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 canvas erupts with kinetic energy — mounted Native American warriors riding hard into a thundering herd of bison across an open expanse of the Great Plains. Horses and buffalo surge together in a tight, dust-churned mass, the hunters pressing close with bows drawn and lances leveled, each man and animal locked in the primal urgency of the chase. Russell's palette runs warm and earthy — ochres, burnt siengers, and dusty golds — against a wide, breathing sky that gives the scene both scale and release. The eye moves restlessly through the composition, pulled from horse to hunter to heaving bison, never quite settling, exactly as the scene demands.
Of the recurring themes in Russell's oeuvre, scholar Peter Hassrick notes that none was more thoroughly explored than the buffalo hunt — and for Russell, that hunt was "generally a grand enterprise reserved for the pre-reservation Indian," who represented, in his view, the single most significant symbol of the West. This painting belongs to that sustained meditation. Russell had spent time living with the Bloods (now known as the Kainai Nation) in 1888, forging close friendships, hunting with tribesmen, and learning their language, legends, and customs — knowledge that saturates every detail of the work.
Russell understood that traditions like the buffalo hunt carried timeless, universal values that only the arts could preserve — because civilization had already crushed the plains cultures by the time his brush was recording them.
The painting passed through distinguished hands, including the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, before entering private collections — a provenance that speaks to its standing within the canon of Western American art.
As wall art, *Buffalo Hunting* commands a room with strong natural light and generous wall space — a study, a great room, or any interior that can absorb its sense of open-range scale. It speaks directly to viewers drawn to the drama and moral weight of the American West: not the myth of conquest, but the lived world that preceded it. The painting doesn't decorate a room so much as anchor it, lending the kind of charged stillness that comes from art with something real at stake.
