About this work
During the winter of 1893–94, Russell settled down to serious painting and completed the works that would illustrate Beacom's book.
**The Great Game for the Rulership of the World**
The title alone carries mythic weight, and the watercolor delivers on its promise. Drawn from a Blackfeet origin legend, this scene depicts animals locked in primordial contest — a gathering of the natural world's great powers competing, as the Blackfeet story tells it, for dominance over the earth itself. Russell marshals his subjects with the instinct of a storyteller, not a taxonomist: the animals are rendered with physical authority, their postures charged with tension rather than merely observed. Working in watercolor on paper, Russell keeps his palette earthen and alive — the ochres, dusty blues, and tawny browns of the northern plains — with the looseness of a medium he had been refining over years of field sketching. The painting is signed and inscribed with the artist's signature skull at the lower right , that characteristically Russell flourish that places him, quietly, as a witness to all things mortal.
*How the Buffalo Lost His Crown* was one of Russell's first serious professional projects, undertaken just as he committed to leaving the cowboy life behind — a Blackfeet legend that Lieutenant John H. Beacom had learned from a Blackfeet orator and entrusted to Russell to visualize.
Beacom must have found in Russell a kindred spirit, as both men clearly possessed an empathy toward storytelling experiences drawn from their interactions with Indigenous Americans.
After living among the Blood Indians of the Blackfoot Nation, Russell's work became deeply informed by that experience, and his firsthand knowledge gave him an empathy and reverence for Native American culture that resonates strongly in his paintings of them. This watercolor sits at that exact threshold — the moment Russell pivoted from wrangler to working artist, and chose Indigenous mythology as worthy of his full creative attention.
On the wall, this piece rewards a viewer who slows down. It isn't spectacle — it's ceremony. The muted, sun-baked palette works particularly well in rooms with warm natural light: a study lined with wood and leather, a reading room, a hallway where something needs to hold its ground. It speaks to people drawn to the mythology of
