CHARLES M. RUSSELL

Monograph Number Two in The Mentor Reading Course

Mr. Russell belongs to no established school of art. His work is distinctly his own, and he is known as the “cowboy artist.” This does not mean, however, that there is anything careless or hasty about his art. He works with great care. His hand is trained to note every detail of his subject, and he has a memory that never lets go. Several years ago Russell had an exhibit in a gallery in New York City which he called “Pictures of the West That Has Passed.”

There was fine audacity in this. The man who had never taken a lesson in an art school and had had very little opportunity to see fine art work, who had no critic more severe than himself, took one of the big galleries in New York City for a “one-man exhibit.” Russell had the courage of his convictions, and his convictions were soon shared by art lovers; for he took his place at once among the best painters of the West.

Charles Russell was born in St. Louis in 1865, and, like Remington, had a deep-seated objection to the rules and routine of schools. The most interesting thing in the school curriculum to Russell was “vacation,” and it was his habit to add to his vacation privileges whenever he could by playing hooky. When he was fifteen he was permitted to leave school and go out to the great wild West, the land of his heart’s desire, and there he began his real education. He was no delinquent in that greater school, nor was he ever truant; for when Nature became his teacher and all outdoors his textbook he showed himself a keen and interested student.

He went to Montana when life on the range was in its glory, and the Indians were part of everyday existence. For eleven years he rode the range by choice, doing night work that he might have daylight for painting and modeling. He was ever possessed by a passion to reproduce in color or in clay the rapidly shifting scenes about him, and so, day after day and year after year, he was laying a splendid foundation for the great work that was before him. He lived among the Indians and came to know their inner life, their hopes and aspirations. He learned their sign language and customs, and so is able to depict Indians as if he were one of them. His great success has come not as a gift of the gods, but as a well earned reward after years of hard and diligent work and close application.

For several years he was known in the East just for book and magazine illustrations, usually in black and white. Then he went to New York and made himself known as a painter.

Mr. Russell spends little time in the East. Naturally he was gratified that his work won for him an immediate and distinguished place; but he was not of the mood nor had he the time to stand in the limelight. The great West was ever beckoning him back, and every summer would find him at some Indian reservation or roaming in the wild regions seeking passionately for the subjects that he loved to paint on canvas or model in clay. Other things interested him little. Russell the man is the same as Russell the schoolboy,—indifferent to books or academic matters, but eager for the things that have a living interest for him. The bargain that he used to propose to his schoolmates sounded the keynote of his life, “You get my lessons for me, and I will make you two Indians.”

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION
ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 3. No. 9. SERIAL No. 85
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

MY BUNKIE. By Charles Schreyvogel

“MY BUNKIE,” by Charles Schreyvogel, a picture that made a great sensation and brought the artist sudden fame, is the subject of one of the intaglio-gravure pictures illustrating “Painters of Western Life.”