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.

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 has long been recognized for his action-packed paintings, drawings, and sculpture of cowboys, fur trappers, Native American buffalo hunters and warriors, and other heroes of the Old West. Russell's best-known works capture the excitement and deadly risk of men battling nature and one another in a majestic landscape of mountains and plains. Less well known are Russell's hundreds of depictions of western women. As renowned author and art historian Ginger K. Renner observed thirty-five years ago, no other artist of the West devoted more of his time and talent to the portrayal of women. But few have followed Renner's lead--until now. Lavishly illustrated with full-color illustrations, Charles M. Russell: The Women in His Life and Art presents groundbreaking essays essential to understanding the role of western women in Russell's art. This volume is both a tribute to the women who nurtured Russell's artistic development and a landmark in the study of the role of women in a genre all too often identified almost exclusively with a masculine world. The catalogue essays examine the exhibition's theme from four unique perspectives. Joan Carpenter Troccoli provides an over­view of the works in the exhibition and the social, cultural, and personal values that influenced them. Emily Crawford Wilson explores Russell's interest in the feminine ideal, tying it to wider artistic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jennifer Bottomly-O'looney describes Russell's friendship with Ben and Lela Roberts, who introduced the artist to Nancy Cooper, the woman who would become his wife and indispensable business partner. Thomas A. Petrie employs extended excerpts from Nancy's unpublished biographical memoir to illuminate the Russells' marriage, a relationship sustained by affection and mutual respect, as well as shrewd creative and marketing decisions.

"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.

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.