Page 134 - 2019 Russell Catalogue

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CHARLES M. RUSSELL (1864–1926) Stone-In-Moccasin Woman
oil
9 1⁄4 x 9 inches
Inscription: Lr: CM Russell/(skull)
$70,000–100,000
Recorded in Charles M. Russell: A Catalog Raisonné: CR.NE.13
PROVENANCE
• Private collection, Minnesota
• Private collection, Boston, Massachusetts
• James Joyce, Boston, Massachusetts
• Sydney Melville Shoenberg, Jr.
• Sotheby’s, New York, New York
• Thomas Nygard Gallery, Bozeman, Montana
• Private collection, Montana
A copy of a letter from Ginger K. Renner, dated November 1995, will accompany this painting.
Mothers Under the Skin, 1900, pen and ink on paper, C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, Montana, Gift of Jock Warden, 985-10-2
Even in his earlier works, Russell demonstrated his interest in realistically depicting the experience of the Native American Woman. Time and time again, the artist returned to the subject and shed a light of admiration upon this historically underappreciated population. It was these women who, for countless generations, fulfilled maternal roles while carrying out their many other critical functions within the Plains Indian culture.
With insight as to why Russell depicted white women far less frequently than Native subjects, Russell scholar Brian Dippie writes: “White women did not fit into Russell’s version of yesterday. Like Nancy herself, they represented the future, not the past, and it was the past that nourished his artistic vision.”1
Dippie also observes: “If they [white women] did appear, which was rarely, they usually served as counterpoint to the Old West, Ma Nature’s West, the West that has passed.”2 An excellent
example of this contrast is Russell’s masterful pen and ink drawing Mothers Under the Skin. Therein, one of the maternal subjects, complete with baby in a papoose, draws a striking similarity to Stone-in Moccasin Woman.
1 Brian W. Dippie, Joan Carpenter Troccoli, Emily Crawford Wilson, Jennifer Bottomly-O’looney, and Thomas A. Petrie, Charles M. Russell: The Women in His Life and Art (Great Falls, MT: C.M. Russell Museum, 2018), 5.
2 Ibid.