Page 81 - 2020 Russell Catalogue

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CHARLES M. RUSSELL (1864–1926) Woman Petting an Unsaddled Horse, n.d. pen and ink
8 x 9 inches
$15,000–20,000
Recorded in Charles M. Russell: A Catalog Raisonné: CR.DR.434
She was a Western girl, he could tell that by the tan and by her various little departures from the
Eastern styles—such as doing her hair low rather than high.
—B.M. Bower, The Lure of Dim Trails
Russell’s good friend Bertrand W. Sinclair was the second of author Bertha “B.M.” Bower’s three husbands. When “Fiddle-Back”, as Charlie referred Sinclair, introduced his talented wife to the cowboy artist quickly gaining popularity, an exceptional author-illustrator tandem was formed.1 Russell eventually illustrated four of Bower’s books: Chip of the Flying U (1906), The Range Dwellers (1906), The Lure of Dim Trails (1907), and The Uphill Climb (1913).
Woman Petting an Unsaddled Horse serves as illustration for Bower’s The Lure of Dim Trails about an Eastern writer who travels to his birthplace of Fort Benton to gain an authentic western perspective and a first-hand view of cowboy life. The illustration appears near the text where both the protagonist and the reader meets Mona, a real Western woman with blue-grey eyes.
PROVENANCE ILLUSTRATION
• •
Charles S. Jones
Private collection by descent, California
• Bower, B.M. The Lure of the Dim Trails, 1907, p. 16, line engraving
1
Brian W. Dippie, Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters 1887–1926 (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1993), 114.