Page 93 - 2020 Russell Catalogue

115
SYDNEY MORTIMER LAURENCE (1865–1940)
Country Cottage
oil
16 x 20 inches
$8,000–12,000
PROVENANCE
• Private colletcion, Florida
116
CHARLES (CARL) WIMAR (1828–1862)
set of four drawings
Two Men with Headdresses; Portrait of a Little Soldier, Yanctonais Chief and Unidentified Follower; Indian Woman Gesturing; Indian Man with Gun graphite
13 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 inches; 13 5⁄8 x 9 5⁄8 inches; 13 1⁄2 x 9 1⁄2 inches; 13 5⁄8 x 91⁄2 inches
$15,000–20,000
PROVENANCE
• Private colletcion, Montana
Russell rarely acknowledged his artistic influences, but St. Louis artist Carl Wimer was a notable exception. In a 1907 letter from Russell to Mr. Charles Reynershoffer, the artist writes, “I have always liked his [Wimer’s] work and think he knew the Indian.”1
In 1862, two years before Charles Russell was born, Carl Wimer died at the young age of thirty-two. In summarizing Wimer’s background and influence on Montana’s cowboy artist, John Taliaferro writes:
One artist whose work young Charlie Russell did view repeatedly was Carl Wimar. Wimar was born in Germany in 1828; when he was fifteen his family emigrated to the United States and settled among the growing German community in St. Louis....Wimar’s work was hard for Charlie to miss. It hung in the parlors of St Louis’s prominent families, and in 1862 Wimar completed a series of murals for the St. Louis Courthouse. Charlie never met Wimar, who died only weeks after completing the courthouse commission.2
1 2
Brian W. Dippie, Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters 1887–1926 (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 1993), 89. John Taliaferro, Charles M. Russell (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 26–27.