AUCTIONS Scottsdale Art Auction 2016 The Scout

282 The Scout

Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 37,500.00 USD
Estimated at 75,000.00 - 100,000.00 USD
The Scout
Artist: Russell, Charles M.Date of Birth: 1864-1926
Medium: Watercolor and Gouache
Dimensions: 14 x 11 inches
Signed: Signed lower left and dated 1900
Verso:

Born in 1864 just as the Civil War was coming to a close, young Charlie Russell’s hometown—St. Louis—was the gateway to the West, the borderland between “civilization” and the rapidly filling “frontier.” Russell saw people and horses lighting out for the open range and their stories enthralled him. At the same time, his mother’s interest in and aptitude for painting flowers—in watercolor—seemed to plant the seed that would become a vocation. Still in his teens, Russell convinced his parents to allow him to head West and try his hand at punching cows. He did, making a go of it even as he made fast friends among the characters of the Montana Territory’s Judith Basin. Soon, he began to try to capture cowboy life in art, principally, at first, in watercolor. Russell’s work was being published regularly in Harper’s Weekly and had been acclaimed as original, fresh and real even before he married Nancy Cooper in 1896. Nancy took responsibility for the business end of Russell’s art and proved to be a tough, shrewd agent for her husband. A career was born.
What drew Russell at first to the medium of watercolor was that materials and instruction manuals were available and portable. Watercolor paints and paper and books went where Russell went, right in the saddlebag. But Russell’s West, the West as he imagined it, was already receding into history, and in works like The Scout, the artist emerges as a kind of visionary, elevating the struggles between Native Americans, cowboys, vaqueros, the elements themselves, as a kind of prelapsarian agon, a war between gods whose paradise slipped away and became just another haunt for humans to despoil. Here, the brave, in full regalia, bearing a spear rather than a rifle, seems to force his way out of the paper, a bas-relief against blankness.
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