Indians Hunting Buffalo
This conversation is connected to Indians Hunting Buffalo.
Charles M. Russell painted Indians Hunting Buffalo in 1894, oil on canvas, signed in the lower left. A hunter on horseback drives a spear into a buffalo at full gallop across open grassland, the horse's legs gathered beneath it, the buffalo's head lowered for a final charge. Russell moved from St. Louis to Montana at sixteen and spent the rest of his life painting the American West. He produced over fifty buffalo hunt paintings and sculptures during his career, though he never actually witnessed one — by the time he arrived in Montana in 1880, the herds were nearly gone. Russell relied on conversations with older members of the Blackfoot nation, historical accounts, and his own deep knowledge of animal anatomy from years of working as a wrangler. This particular composition was commissioned by Robert Vaughn and may have been modeled after Titian Ramsay Peale's 1832 lithograph of the same subject. The original is in the Sid Richardson Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.