Review of "Paintings & Sketches" by Charles M. Russell

Review of

Paintings & Sketches by Charles M. Russell

Five out of five stars

 There has been a lot of mythologizing of the American West in the media, with most images that viewers have of the people of the west being inaccurate. Charles Russell was a man that lived in Montana in the last half of the nineteenth century (starting in 1879) and captured a great deal of what it was in his paintings. While the process of forcing the Native Americans onto reservations was well underway, there were still pockets of free people that more or less lived as they had for centuries.

 In this book you see images of a man breaking a horse, Native Americans on their horses and on the move or engaged in the hunt, battles between whites and Natives or between Native tribes and whites engaged in cowboy actions. All of them are very realistic, there is great detail down to the facial expressions.

 For example, on page 29 there is an image of a lawman rousting two men out of their bedrolls at dawn. Their faces are clearly full of sleep and surprise. The west was a hard place of adventure and challenge, some of that is accurately captured in this collection of images by a master.