Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist - Hardcover

When he left St. Louis to rusticate in Montana in 1880, Russell was only 16 years old and entranced by a West whose archetypes were then jelling into the stereotypes familiar to us today. With a gregarious sense of adventure and budding artistic talent, he stayed there for a lifetime, which, surprisingly enough, is here first given the cradle-to-grave treatment. A debut author, Taliaferro writes like a veteran, going beyond chronicle to plumb his subject's inner, emotional life, embedded in the atmosphere of his times. Montana in the 1880s, though no longer a frontier, was plenty wild, and Taliaferro engagingly relates Russell's ventures to experience the figures in his imagination: cowboys and Indians, buffalo and bears. An easy maker of friends (with the cowboys), he met them, camped and drank with them, and put them down first as doodles, eventually as paintings. A better boon companion than savvy art marketeer, Russell didn't taste success until his marriage to a possessive woman his chums resentfully called the "little robber," but Nancy gave Charlie the necessary push out of the saloons and into the galleries. Whatever Russell's status in art history--detractors debunk his work for sentimentalism; enthusiasts value its evocative panoramas--his companionable character is seamlessly restored by Taliaferro. Gilbert Taylor