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Lot Essay
A burst of gunfire cracks through the Western haze as a herd of cattle surges up from a brush-choked ravine. In Smoking Them Out, Charles Marion Russell transforms a routine range task into high drama. Painted in 1906, the work stands as an early example of the dynamism and technical command that characterize Russell’s mature style. It captures a moment of pure frontier action that Russell knew intimately from his years on the range. The method—used to “smoke out” stubborn cattle that had strayed into the shadowed coulees and brushy draws beyond a rider’s reach—required equal parts nerve and horsemanship. Yet in Russell’s hands, the scene becomes more than anecdote. It is a study in motion, sound, and the dusty choreography of the West.
Russell’s genius lay in uniting observed truth with mythic vision. He earned his reputation as the “Cowboy Artist” through vivid action pictures grounded in firsthand experience—first as a horse wrangler, then as a working cowboy. Determined to record a way of life he saw fading from view, he left the range behind in 1893 and turned to painting full-time. Russell understood that the cowboy—both a laborer of the open range and a legend of the national imagination—occupied two worlds at once. “Cowboys have always enjoyed an elevated position in American popular culture,” notes Joan Carpenter Troccoli, “a status due in part to their rebellion against the strictures of polite society, but in real life they were occupants of a lowly rank in the class structure, poorly paid seasonal workers with short careers and utterly insecure prospects for retirement.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, Norman, Oklahoma, 2009, p. 48) Yet through Russell’s eyes, that precarious existence assumed dignity and grace. In works like Smoking Them Out, labor becomes art.
At the composition’s center, a cowboy twists in the saddle, his horse veering sharply as he fires a shot into the air. Around them, dust begins to spiral into an ochre veil that blurs the boundary between man, beast, and land. Below the ridge, the cattle surge forward in confusion, their chestnut frames breaking through the haze in flashes of horn and hide. Russell’s brushwork is loose yet exacting, capturing the velocity of the moment without sacrificing structure. His palette suggests a landscape alive with heat and motion. Even the air, punctuated by gun smoke and dust, seems to tremble.
This heightened sensitivity to atmosphere marked a turning point in Russell’s art. His 1905 trip to New York exposed him to a wider circle of publishers, critics, and painters, expanding both his audience and his technique. Two years earlier, he had met the illustrators John Marchand and Will Crawford during their visit to Montana. Back in New York, they introduced him to the sporting painter Philip Goodwin and to Charles Schreyvogel, who in turn directed him to the Roman Bronze Works foundry, where he cast his first bronze, Smoking Up. Exposure to Eastern studios refined his touch without compromising his authenticity. In the works that followed, the earth and air of the West began to move with new subtlety—forms softened, gestures tightened, and color took on the shimmer of lived experience. Peter H. Hassrick later concluded, “By 1905 his handling of human and equine forms had reached its peak.” (Charles M. Russell, New York, 1989, p. 82)
As Russell absorbed lessons from his peers in New York, they in turn recognized something in him they could not replicate. Two years before his first visit east, Marchand confessed, “I have just been in ‘cow country’ and have been attempting to do what [Russell] does. I don’t think there is anyone who can ‘touch him’ on his subjects.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, p. 32) To men like Marchand and Crawford, Russell embodied an ideal of authenticity.
Motion was the measure of truth for Russell. He was the first to admit that he could not perform the intricate maneuvers of a seasoned cowhand or match the precision of an academically trained painter. But that was never his aim. What mattered was the rhythm and irregularity of movement—the unschooled grace of horses shifting under strain, the improvised balance of a rider at work. Like the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, who found poetry in the awkward tilt of a dancer’s body or the fatigue of a jockey at the rail, Russell drew vitality from imperfection. Within those crooked, unheroic poses that defined real labor, veterans of the range recognized a truth that Russell’s contemporaries could not match.
The cowboys in Smoking Them Out are not archetypes but living figures, rendered with the anatomical precision of one who knew the weight of a saddle and the recoil of a Colt. In 1911 artist and critic Arthur Hoeber noted, "[Russell] paints the West that has passed from an intimate personal knowledge of it; for he was there in the midst of it all, and he has the tang of its spirit in his blood.” (The World's Work, June 1911, p. 379)
In Smoking Them Out, Russell distills the essential paradox of his own career: the artist as both participant and observer, insider and historian. Like the cowboys he painted, he operated between freedom and constraint—between the open range and the framing edge of the canvas. His art bridges those worlds, translating the rough immediacy of lived experience into the enduring language of form and color. Each gunshot and galloping horse in Smoking Them Out reverberates with personal memory; each stroke carries the dust of the Judith Basin.
Russell’s genius lay in uniting observed truth with mythic vision. He earned his reputation as the “Cowboy Artist” through vivid action pictures grounded in firsthand experience—first as a horse wrangler, then as a working cowboy. Determined to record a way of life he saw fading from view, he left the range behind in 1893 and turned to painting full-time. Russell understood that the cowboy—both a laborer of the open range and a legend of the national imagination—occupied two worlds at once. “Cowboys have always enjoyed an elevated position in American popular culture,” notes Joan Carpenter Troccoli, “a status due in part to their rebellion against the strictures of polite society, but in real life they were occupants of a lowly rank in the class structure, poorly paid seasonal workers with short careers and utterly insecure prospects for retirement.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, Norman, Oklahoma, 2009, p. 48) Yet through Russell’s eyes, that precarious existence assumed dignity and grace. In works like Smoking Them Out, labor becomes art.
At the composition’s center, a cowboy twists in the saddle, his horse veering sharply as he fires a shot into the air. Around them, dust begins to spiral into an ochre veil that blurs the boundary between man, beast, and land. Below the ridge, the cattle surge forward in confusion, their chestnut frames breaking through the haze in flashes of horn and hide. Russell’s brushwork is loose yet exacting, capturing the velocity of the moment without sacrificing structure. His palette suggests a landscape alive with heat and motion. Even the air, punctuated by gun smoke and dust, seems to tremble.
This heightened sensitivity to atmosphere marked a turning point in Russell’s art. His 1905 trip to New York exposed him to a wider circle of publishers, critics, and painters, expanding both his audience and his technique. Two years earlier, he had met the illustrators John Marchand and Will Crawford during their visit to Montana. Back in New York, they introduced him to the sporting painter Philip Goodwin and to Charles Schreyvogel, who in turn directed him to the Roman Bronze Works foundry, where he cast his first bronze, Smoking Up. Exposure to Eastern studios refined his touch without compromising his authenticity. In the works that followed, the earth and air of the West began to move with new subtlety—forms softened, gestures tightened, and color took on the shimmer of lived experience. Peter H. Hassrick later concluded, “By 1905 his handling of human and equine forms had reached its peak.” (Charles M. Russell, New York, 1989, p. 82)
As Russell absorbed lessons from his peers in New York, they in turn recognized something in him they could not replicate. Two years before his first visit east, Marchand confessed, “I have just been in ‘cow country’ and have been attempting to do what [Russell] does. I don’t think there is anyone who can ‘touch him’ on his subjects.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, p. 32) To men like Marchand and Crawford, Russell embodied an ideal of authenticity.
Motion was the measure of truth for Russell. He was the first to admit that he could not perform the intricate maneuvers of a seasoned cowhand or match the precision of an academically trained painter. But that was never his aim. What mattered was the rhythm and irregularity of movement—the unschooled grace of horses shifting under strain, the improvised balance of a rider at work. Like the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, who found poetry in the awkward tilt of a dancer’s body or the fatigue of a jockey at the rail, Russell drew vitality from imperfection. Within those crooked, unheroic poses that defined real labor, veterans of the range recognized a truth that Russell’s contemporaries could not match.
The cowboys in Smoking Them Out are not archetypes but living figures, rendered with the anatomical precision of one who knew the weight of a saddle and the recoil of a Colt. In 1911 artist and critic Arthur Hoeber noted, "[Russell] paints the West that has passed from an intimate personal knowledge of it; for he was there in the midst of it all, and he has the tang of its spirit in his blood.” (The World's Work, June 1911, p. 379)
In Smoking Them Out, Russell distills the essential paradox of his own career: the artist as both participant and observer, insider and historian. Like the cowboys he painted, he operated between freedom and constraint—between the open range and the framing edge of the canvas. His art bridges those worlds, translating the rough immediacy of lived experience into the enduring language of form and color. Each gunshot and galloping horse in Smoking Them Out reverberates with personal memory; each stroke carries the dust of the Judith Basin.