By 1897 Russell had been working in Montana for roughly seventeen years, having come west from St. Louis in 1880 as a teenager. He spent the 1880s as a wrangler and night herder in the Judith Basin, where he observed Blackfeet, Crow, and Cree camps firsthand and lived for a period among the Blood Blackfeet in Alberta in 1888. By the mid-1890s he had given up cowboying entirely for full-time painting, and subjects of Native domestic and travel life — as distinct from battle scenes or hunts — became a sustained interest. Travois imagery recurs throughout his work because the device condensed everything that interested him about pre-reservation Plains mobility: the horse culture, the movable lodge, the household on the march.

Russell (1864–1926) is the central figure in the Montana school of Western art and, with Frederic Remington, one of the two artists most responsible for shaping popular visual memory of the northern Plains. The sheet entered the collection of Amon G. Carter, the Fort Worth publisher and oilman whose Russell and Remington holdings became the founding core of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art when it opened in 1961. Although this watercolor does not illustrate a Lewis and Clark Expedition episode directly, Russell was the principal twentieth-century painter of Corps of Discovery subjects, and his ethnographic studies of travois transport inform the visual vocabulary later applied to expedition scenes such as his Montana statehouse mural and the Sacagawea paintings of the early 1900s.

The post Indian Family with Travois appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The subtitle “Old Style Warfare” signals Russell’s intent to record intertribal combat as it had been waged before the consolidation of the reservation system, when raiding and counter-raiding between Cree bands from the north and Blackfeet on the northwestern plains were ongoing features of life on the upper Missouri and Saskatchewan drainages. By 1895, when Russell made the painting, those running fights were a generation in the past. He was thirty-one and had been living in Montana since 1880, first as a wrangler and then increasingly as a working artist; he had spent the winter of 1888–89 with the Blood (Kainai) Blackfeet in Alberta, an experience that shaped his lifelong attention to Blackfeet material culture and to the horse cultures of the northwestern plains more broadly. Watercolors of this period helped him transition from illustrator to recognized painter of the West.

Russell (1864–1926) produced thousands of works ranging from quick sketches to large oils, and intertribal combat scenes form a recognizable subset within his output, distinct from his cowboy subjects and his Lewis and Clark paintings of the early twentieth century. The present sheet bears the credit line of the Amon G. Carter Collection and entered the holdings of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, the institution Carter’s collection seeded, which holds one of the most comprehensive groups of Russell’s works on paper. Its current location is not recorded in the available documentation.

The post Running Fight Between Crees and Blackfeet, Old Style Warfare appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

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.

The post Sun Worship in Montana appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The post Curly Bear Wagner on Blackfeet History and Lewis & Clark appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The post Conrad Fiser on Northern Cheyenne History and Lewis & Clark appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The post Lloyd Topsky on Chippewa Cree Language and Culture appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The post Maynard Kicking Woman on Blackfeet Drum Traditions appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.