Page 86 - 2020 Russell Catalogue

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CHARLES M. RUSSELL (1864–1926) Deaf Bull [No. 2], 1898
watercolor
12 3⁄4 x 9 3⁄4 inches
Inscription: Ll: CM Russell/(skull) 1898
$80,000–120,000
Recorded in Charles M. Russell: A Catalog Raisonné: CR.UNL.238
Several months after emerging cowboy artist Charles Russell created his famed Waiting for
a Chinook, Crow Chief Deaf Bull was repeatedly in the
news. It was also in the late months of 1887 that Russell submitted his first illustration that was accepted by a national publication. Harper’s Weekly acquired Russell’s depiction of two cowboys discovering a group of starving Crow Indians while they butchered an ill-obtained range cow. In this tension-
filled composition that Russell titled Caught in the Act, the artist presented a sympathetic perspective of the desperate Crow people to a national audience.1 Russell’s unwavering respect for the individual
and collective Plains Indian peoples was apparent from those formative years until, and beyond, his ca. 1898 creation of this important portrait of Deaf Bull.
PROVENANCE
• Private collection, Montana
1
John Taliaferro, Charles M. Russell (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 76.