Sun Worship in Montana
Russell’s Sun Worship in Montana shows a lone Plains Indian man, mounted on a light-colored horse, holding a long staff or pipe-stem aloft toward the rising or setting sun. The figure is positioned on open prairie with low ridges visible in the middle distance, and the sky—washed in pale golds and blues—occupies more than half the composition. Russell uses a vertical format unusual for his horseback subjects, which emphasizes the upright posture of horse and rider and the vast sky above them. The brushwork is loose in the landscape and tighter in the figure, where Russell renders the rider’s feathered headdress, leggings, and the horse’s painted markings with the ethnographic precision he was known for.
The painting dates from 1907, a productive period in Russell’s career when he had moved beyond his earliest cowboy-life subjects and was increasingly devoting canvases to Plains Indian life as he understood it from his time among the Blood (Kainai) in Alberta in 1888–1889 and from continued contact with Blackfeet and other tribes in Montana. By 1907 Russell had relocated to Great Falls, was married to Nancy Cooper Russell (who managed his career and prices), and was beginning to command serious eastern attention. Works depicting Native spiritual practice—dances, ceremonies, prayer to the sun—formed a recurring strand in his output during these years, reflecting both his sympathy for Plains peoples and a wider Euro-American interest in recording what was assumed to be a vanishing way of life.
Russell (1864–1926) had come to Montana from St. Louis as a teenager and built his reputation as the self-taught cowboy artist of the northern plains, in counterpoint to Frederic Remington’s more cosmopolitan production. Sun Worship in Montana is held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of the Amon G. Carter Collection, the foundational gift of Western art that established the museum in 1961. While not a Lewis and Clark subject, the painting belongs to the broader visual record of the upper Missouri country the expedition traversed a century before Russell painted it, and it documents the Indigenous religious life that Lewis and Clark observed but rarely described with sympathy.
