Vintage Captivating Native American Art Print 🪶 by Charles Russell 1970s

Who Painted Trail's End? 🐎 The painting is "Trail's End"

Size: 11" x 8 1/2" ~ a flat, unlettered color print, cream margin all around, no signature or text anywhere on the sheet.

This print reproduces Charles M. Russell's "Trail's End" — his last painting, left unfinished and unsigned when he died in 1926. A mounted rider in a feathered war bonnet points ahead from a buckskin horse on a sage-covered rise, a second rider beside him, a third with a bow or coup stick behind, figures on foot at the edges, all lit by a blue-green dusk sky over a pink-orange horizon. Yale's Beinecke Library holds an early printing of the same composition, captioned "(Trail's end) (The last unfinished, unsigned Russell oil painting)"; the Buffalo Bill Center of the West lists the original as oil on canvas, 1926. Our sheet carries no lettering at all — no title, no signature, no date; the composition is what names it.

🏡 Why "Trail's End"

Trail's End was the name Nancy Russell gave the pueblo-style house she built on Michigan Boulevard in Pasadena in 1926, the year her husband died — Charlie never got to live in it. Trail's End Publishing Company, Inc. operated out of that same address and put out a run of Russell material between 1946 and 1954: two books of his pen-and-ink drawings, Con Price's memoir "Trails I Rode," Ramon Adams and Homer Britzman's biography "Charles M. Russell, the Cowboy Artist," a Russell bibliography, and a 1952 series of postcards. The company issued a printing of this very picture in 1948.

📚 Homer Britzman's collection

Homer E. Britzman, a Colorado Springs oilman, bought Trail's End from Nancy Russell and spent years gathering Russell letters, drawings and belongings — more than ten thousand pieces in all. His widow Helen left the collection to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1972; it was sold in 2009 to the University of Tulsa and now lives at the Gilcrease Museum, which holds its own "Trail's End" in the Russell research collection.

🤠 Charles M. Russell

Charles Marion Russell was born March 19, 1864, in St. Louis, and left for Montana Territory at sixteen. Folks called him the Cowboy Artist, and he came by it honestly: he was one of the first Western painters to live most of his life in the West he painted. In 1882 he took a job as night wrangler for the Judith Basin roundup and stayed on the range eleven years, riding for several cattle outfits and sketching the whole time, before he hung it up in 1893 to paint full time. From 1888 he also lived for a time with the Blood people (Kainai), part of the Blackfoot Confederacy — the stretch of his life his Native American subjects are drawn from. He died October 24, 1926, in Great Falls, Montana. He's in the Hall of Great Westerners (1955) and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame (1985). His paintings do reach real money at auction — "Piegans" (1918) brought $5.6 million in 2005, and "Trail of the Iron Horse" (1924) sold for $1.9 million — records for particular canvases, not a standing price for every Russell that comes up.