Vintage 1970s Charles M. Russell 🦬 Finding the Trail Art Print American Western Americana

Where Is the Danger in This Picture? 🦬 Vintage 1970s Charles M. Russell Finding the Trail Art Print

Size: 11" x 8 1/2"

The thing to watch in this picture isn't in the middle of it. A band of riders has stopped on a red ridge, one man off his horse way out to the left with his arm raised, and every head has swung his way. Out past him, small on the flat, is whatever they've been tracking. Russell named it Finding the Trail and lettered the title right into the bottom of the painting.

This is a new old stock print of it, about 11 by 8 1/2 inches, on a canvas-textured paper so it has some of the feel of a painted surface instead of a slick poster finish, with a white border all around and a blank back. Every one I have is unused and has never been framed.

🖌️ The signature and the 1902

Down in the lower left you'll find Russell's name with his buffalo-skull mark and the year 1902 under it. That's his signature as he painted it on the canvas, printed along with the rest of the picture - it's not hand-signed, and the 1902 is the year of the painting, not of the print. The buffalo skull was the mark he signed with through most of his career.

🤠 The cowboy who painted it

Charles Marion Russell was born in St. Louis on March 19, 1864, quit school at sixteen and headed for Montana to work on a sheep ranch. He never left. He wrangled horses on the night herd and rode for outfits in the Judith Basin, and he spent a good stretch learning the country from a hunter and trapper named Jake Hoover.

Starting in 1888 he lived for a while among the Blood - the Kainai - one of the nations of the Blackfoot. You can see it in his work. His riders are people, not shapes; every shield is painted different and every bit of tack hangs the way real tack does. Plenty of painters came west for the scenery and missed all that. War parties were a subject he went back to over and over - The War Party, the Blackfeet War Party watercolor of around 1896, Sun River War Party - and the Blackfeet were the people he painted most.

He married Nancy Cooper in 1896, they settled in Great Falls in 1897, and she's the one who turned a cowboy who swapped pictures for drinks into an artist with buyers on two continents. He made about 4,000 works before he died in Great Falls on October 24, 1926.

❄️ The postcard-sized painting that started it

The winter of 1886-87 wiped out the open-range cattle business. Russell was a hand on a ranch when the owner wrote asking how the herd was making it. Instead of a letter, Russell sent back a little watercolor about the size of a postcard - a bony steer in the snow with wolves waiting at the edge. People called it Waiting for a Chinook, it got passed all over Montana, and it made his name before he'd sold a real painting. Same trick as Finding the Trail: the story is the part you can't quite see.

🏛️ Where the real ones hang

The C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls is built around his house and his log-cabin studio, and big Russell collections hang in Helena, Cody, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In Fort Worth it's the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which grew out of newspaperman Amon G. Carter's own Russell and Remington collection and holds more than 300 Russell paintings, bronzes, watercolors, drawings and illustrations. In Cody it's the Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. His oils and bronzes sell at the very top of the western art market, which is exactly why prints like this exist - the originals aren't coming back out.

🦬 About these

They're 11 by 8 1/2 inches, so they drop into a standard frame without trimming a thing. Hang one in a den or a ranch office, add it to your western art, or give it to anybody who grew up on Montana or on Russell. The supply is finite - once these last unframed 1970s prints are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.