A pictorial panorama of the paintings, drawings, and sculptures of the nineteenth-century frontier artist is supplemented by a detailed study of his life.

Charles M. Russell is the most beloved artist of the American West. This work, the result of a decade of research and scholarship, features 170 color reproductions of his greatest works and six essays by Russell experts and scholars. Each book contains a unique key code granting access to the more than 4,000 works created and signed by Russell. Visit the website at www.russellraisonne.com.

This first comprehensive biography of Charles M. Russell examines the colorful life and times of Montana’s famed Cowboy Artist. Born to an affluent St. Louis family in 1864, young Russell read thrilling tales of the West and filled sketchbooks with imagined frontier scenes. At sixteen he left home and headed west to become a cowboy. In Montana Territory he consorted with cowpunchers, Indians, preachers, saloon keepers, and prostitutes, while celebrating the waning American frontier’s glory days in some 4,000 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculptures. Before his death in 1926, Russell saw the world change dramatically, and the West he loved passed into legend. By then he was revered as one of the country’s ranking Western artist with works displayed in the finest galleries, his romantic vision of the Old West forever shaping our own. Taliaferro reveals the man behind the myth in his multifaceted complexity: extraordinarily gifted, self-effacing, charming, mischievous, and playful, a friend to rough frontier denizens and Hollywood stars alike. The author also explores Russell’s controversial partnership with his fiery young wife, Nancy, whose ambition and business savvy helped establish Russell as one of America’s most popular artists.

Here in these pages, 73 of Russell's paintings from the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, are splendidly reproduced and accompanied by the descriptive and illuminating commentaries of art critic Louis Chapin.

CHARLIE RUSSELL: The Cowboy Years is not an art book, research paper, or novel, and definitely not fiction. This engaging narrative chronicles the eleven years Charles M. Russell spent on the open range of Montana working as a cowboy, from 1882 until 1893. With Charlie cast as the centerpiece - which he often was during this period - and a supporting cast of friends and horses, this colorful history is filled with adventure. These years as a working cowboy were a formative time for this talented and complex artist, a man of integrity who had a great sense of humor, both childlike and raucous. Saddle up then, and reide along with Charlie and his friends. Tighten your cinch, adjust your stampede string, keep a leg on each side, and expect to have a good time!

"Russell writes easily, and in the vernacular. He tells of Indians and Indian fighters, buffalo hunts, bad men, wolves, wild horses, tough hotels, drinking customs, and hard-riding cowboys. . . . [He] lived long enough in the West to acquire a vast amount of information and lore, and he has left enough from his brush to prove his place as a sound interpreter of a stirring period and a fascinating country".-New York Times. "Russell was the greatest painter who ever painted a range man, a range cow, a range horse, or a Plains Indian. He savvied the cow, the grass, the blizzard, the drought, the wolf, the young puncher in love with his own shadow, the old waddie remembering rides and thirsts of far away and long ago. He was a wonderful storyteller. . . . His subjects were warm with life, whether awake or asleep, at a particular instant, under particular conditions. Trails Plowed Under, prodigally illustrated, is a collection of yarns and ancedotes saturated with humor and humanity".-J. Frank Dobie, Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Brian W. Dippie is a professor of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and the author of Catlin and His Contemporaries: The Politics of Patronage (Nebraska 1990).

"Nancy worked on this biography until her death in 1940 without ever quite finishing it. Tom Petrie and Brian Dippie have collaborated on brining what she did finish into print, with side-bars, photographs, and artwork to amplify her text. [This book] will delight all those who love Charles M. Russell and his enduring vision of "the West that has passed.""--inside cover.

"Charles M. Russell, Word Painter: Letters 1887-1926 is the most comprehensive collection of Russell's correspondence ever assembled. Letters to his wife Nancy, to patrons and fellow artists, and to the saloonkeepers and cowboys who remained his friends for life reveal a surprisingly modest man. Russell downplayed his own verbal skills, but his letters show that he was an artist with words as well as paint, able to evoke a bygone era or make a shrewd social observation in a few well-chosen sentences. Each letter is reproduced in facsimile, allowing readers to see, in the artist's own handwriting and with his inimitable spellings and punctuation, how Russell cleverly interwove colorful sketches and eloquent words to form a memorable whole." "In the accompanying commentary, Brian Dippie places each of Russell's letters within the broader context of the artist's life and career. Dippie identifies the recipient of each letter and the circumstances that prompted the correspondence, clarifies Russell's references to other friends and acquaintances and, where appropriate, relates events in the letter to Russell's artistic development. Photographs, including many that belonged to the Russells, further illustrate the world that the artist and his friends inhabited."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"[Cristy] deals with an important, yet relatively unexplored, aspect of the career of one of the most influential interpreters of the American West."--Byron Price, Director, C. M. Russell Center for the Study of Art