The Buffalo Hunt

Russell’s painting shows a group of mounted Plains Indian hunters in the midst of a buffalo chase across open grassland. The composition is built around movement: bison run from right to left in the foreground and middle distance, kicking up dust, while riders armed with bows and lances close in at full gallop. One hunter in the foreground draws his bow alongside a bull; another rider, partially obscured by dust, presses a second animal. Russell uses a low horizon and a warm, dry palette of tans, ochres, and rust browns, with the distant plain dissolving into pale blue haze. The animals’ anatomy and the riders’ bareback technique—reins gripped short, weight forward—reflect his long firsthand study of both subjects.

By 1919 Russell was sixty-five and had been painting full-time for roughly two decades, having transitioned from cowboy and wrangler in the 1880s to one of the most commercially successful Western artists in the country. The buffalo hunt was a recurring subject for him from the 1890s onward, painted repeatedly in oil and watercolor. He treated it as historical reconstruction: by the time Russell arrived in Montana in 1880, the northern bison herds were already collapsing, and the mounted Indian hunt he depicted was a scene from living memory rather than current observation. Works like this one were part of a broader postwar market for nostalgic Western imagery, sold to collectors and railroad-era patrons who wanted images of a frontier they understood to be gone.

Russell spent most of his adult life in and around Great Falls, Montana, where his log-cabin studio still stands. His sympathy for and knowledge of Plains tribes—particularly the Blackfeet, among whom he had lived briefly in 1888—distinguished his Indian subjects from those of many of his contemporaries. The painting is now held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, entering that collection through Amon G. Carter, the Texas newspaper publisher who assembled one of the largest holdings of Russell and Frederic Remington works in existence. The museum, which opened in 1961, built its early identity on these two artists, and Russell’s buffalo-hunt canvases have remained among its most reproduced holdings.