Vintage Captivating Charles Russell 1970s Art Print 🐎 of Western Life

Who Was Charles Russell? 🐎 Vintage 1970s Art Print of Western Life

Size: 11" x 8 1/2"

🦬 This is Charles M. Russell's Breaking Camp, the heart of his 1897 watercolor, printed up close so you can see the faces. Two women of a Plains camp are packing up to move: a young mother on horseback with her baby riding on her back, an older woman with gray hair leading the horses on a rope, lodge poles and travois loaded behind them, and two dogs resting in the sagebrush. The only words on it are BREAKING CAMP, in small letters near the bottom. The back is blank.

🎨 The Painting

The original is a watercolor Russell signed and dated 1897, about 13 by 19 inches, and it belongs to the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. This print shows the central group. The full painting also has a man riding out ahead with a lance and a long line of riders strung out across the prairie behind them. As the museum describes it, the Indians followed the buffalo herds, and every time the camp moved it was the women who had to break it down and pack it up, which happened often. Children often rode along on the horse travois, and the women built the travois and managed the dogs.

Russell used the title Breaking Camp more than once. There's an earlier cowboy camp painting by that name at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, from around 1885. This one is the 1897 watercolor.

🤠 Charles M. Russell, the Cowboy Artist

Russell was born in St. Louis on March 19, 1864, and left school at sixteen for Montana, where he worked on the range. In 1888 he spent about three months up near High River in Alberta, and the story is that he lived for a while among the Blood people, a branch of the Blackfeet. He married Nancy Cooper in 1896, and in the late summer of 1897, the year he painted this, they moved to Great Falls. His first commission there was a $35 watercolor for the mayor's wife, and it was the first time Nancy set the price. He made about 4,000 works before he died in Great Falls in 1926, and his painting Piegans sold for $5.6 million in 2005.

His old neighbors, the Triggs, kept his memory going. Josephine Trigg's estate helped start the public drive that built the C.M. Russell Gallery in Great Falls, which opened in 1953, and the museum there now holds more than 2,000 of his works, this painting among them.

📏 Details

• Vintage art print of Charles M. Russell's Breaking Camp (1897 watercolor), central detail
• Captioned BREAKING CAMP, no publisher or date printed
• About 11" x 8 1/2", unused, New Old Stock
• You'll get one print like the ones shown

🖼️ It frames up beautifully for a den, a lodge, a Montana cabin or a western-themed office, and it's a great gift for anybody who loves Russell or the old West.