Page 126 - 2019 Russell Catalogue

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CHARLES M. RUSSELL (1864–1926) Indian Scout, 1895
watercolor
13 1⁄2 x 18 1⁄2 inches
Inscription: Ll: CM Russell/(skull) 1895
$225,000–325,000
Recorded in Charles M. Russell: A Catalog Raisonné: CR.UNL.591
While the title of this work is formulated in the singular, the painting actually depicts four mounted warriors moving across a high prairie anticline. In the upper left background, one can see in the valley below what appears to be the Judith Basin’s legendary Square Butte, with which Russell was very familiar.
Until recently, this painting was unlocated. As sometimes happens, it resurfaced following broadening public awareness of Russell’s works in the aftermath of the 2007 publication of Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné.
Russell tended not to date his early watercolors, but as his skills began to rapidly advance in that medium by the middle of the 1890s, he, with evident pride, much more regularly began to both sign and date them.
Rick Stewart, who has written the definitive scholastic assessment of Russell’s watercolors, stated that Russell’s “watercolor activity took a sharp upward turn shortly after his return to Montana.”1 This occurred in about 1893, when he quit cowboying and focused on pursuing his art full time.
Accordingly, this work was executed a couple of years into what Stewart considers Russell’s most productive decade as a watercolorist (1894–1908).
In this painting, Russell conveys a sense of movement by progressively diminishing the definition of
the last two figures. He is cleverly suggesting motion with ever-greater dust kicked up by the leader and the second rider. In effect, Russell is already experimenting with ideas and techniques that became progressively more prominent in his work as that decade unfolded.
In Indian Scout, Russell presents an empathetic and very strong rendition of Native American transgression of “the plains that were his” as imagined not all that long thereafter by the “white Indian” and cowboy artist, Charles Marion Russell.
PROVENANCE
• Clark and Nancy Bonner
• Private collection by descent, California
1 Rick Stewart, Romance Maker: The Watercolors of Charles M. Russell (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2011), 16.