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Lot Essay
At daybreak, a slant of gold strikes the Montana plain. The light slowly pools over the grasses, gathering warmth as it moves toward three riders who have drawn their horses to a halt beside a shallow stream. Their figures—stilled but alert—face east, toward the rising sun. One man lifts his arms in reverence, his skin caught in the pale glow of morning. The others sit quietly, their heads bowed and horses turned in unison. Beneath them, the shadowed earth still holds the night’s cool. The serenity of the scene is only tempered by the bleached skeleton of a fallen buffalo—a quiet emblem of loss that deepens the painting’s spiritual register. The contrast between death in shadow and life in sunlight creates a natural allegory for renewal. In one of his most critically acclaimed works of the early 1900s, The Sun Worshippers, Charles Marion Russell distills the drama of faith, nature, and mortality into a single enduring moment of radiance.
Painted when the artist was nearing 46 years of age, The Sun Worshippers belongs to a period when Russell’s command of light and atmosphere neared its peak. He had long been known as the “Cowboy Artist,” but here he moved beyond the rough narrative of the frontier into something quieter, more reverential. As leading Russell authority Brian W. Dippie observes, “Russell frequently employed a distinctive lighting effect, a brilliant, raking light that illuminates peaks, valleys, and figures behind the foreground action.” Here, he reversed the dynamic entirely: sunlight becomes the action—the element around which every form coheres. “In The Sun Worshippers,” Dippie continues, “the Indians’ reverence for the source of creation mandates that all three men be fully bathed in the sun’s rich glow.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, Denver, Colorado, 2009, p. 187) The figures serve as vessels of illumination, their presence defined by the radiance that envelops them.
When The Sun Worshippers debuted at the Folsom Galleries in New York in the spring of 1911, it did so amid one of the greatest and most ambitious exhibitions of Russell’s career. Titled The West That Has Passed, the show represented his first major national appearance, orchestrated with precision by his wife, Nancy. For nearly three weeks, from April 12 to May 1, the artist’s vision of the American frontier filled the Fifth Avenue gallery: 13 oils, 12 watercolors, and six bronzes, each a testament to a world on the cusp of myth. The Sun Worshippers hung alongside now-canonical paintings—today housed in major museum collections—including The Medicine Man (1908) and The Smoke of a .45 (1908, both in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas), When the Sioux and Blackfeet Meet (1908, Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth), and Jerked Down (1907) and The Wagon Boss (1909, both in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma).
Among the prominent collectors drawn to the exhibition was William Hinckle Smith of Philadelphia, who acquired several works, including The Sun Worshippers. In his correspondence with Smith, Russell elaborated on its meaning with the plainspoken poetry that ran through his letters: “All plains Indians, I think prayed to the sun, [they] were much more devout than their Christian white brothers. This painting represents the advance of a hunting party; the old man is asking the sun for success in the buffalo run. The sun is in the Sun River, or as the Indians call it, Medicine River Valley, in Montana. In the background is Sun River Buttes; in old times this was one of the favorite hunting grounds of the Blackfeet.” (Letter to W. Hinckle Smith, May 18, 1911) The specificity of the reference underscores Russell’s fidelity to lived experience. He was painting not an abstract “Indian ceremony,” but a ritual tied to a particular valley, tribe, and moment of day.
Russell’s empathy for Native American life runs throughout his work. From his earliest years in the Montana Territory, he had lived alongside the Blackfeet and other Plains tribes, observing their customs with a sensitivity rare among his white contemporaries. He rode, camped, and hunted with them, learning their sign talk and the words of their languages, and observing with care the cadence of their lives. Through long familiarity, he came to see Native life not as spectacle but as a complete and dignified order of being. To Russell, their rituals were not curiosities but expressions of a profound harmony with nature, an ethics of coexistence with the land they shared. By situating The Sun Worshippers within the real topography of the Sun River Valley, he transformed this moment of prayer into both homage and witness, fusing devotion to place with devotion to light itself.
In preparing The West That Has Passed, Nancy Russell proved herself not only her husband’s partner but his keenest strategist, attuned to the power of timing and presentation. America’s nostalgia for the frontier was at a fever pitch, and she positioned her husband not as the provincial “cowboy artist” but as a national chronicler of the West that had just slipped from view. To secure critical attention, she commissioned artist and art critic Arthur Hoeber to write the exhibition catalogue essay, along with several well-placed reviews in the press, which he published both anonymously and in his own right.
Hoeber’s glowing profile, “A Painter of the West,” praised Russell’s atmospheric power and singled out The Sun Worshippers as a picture of profound emotional resonance. “This composition,” he wrote, “is big in conception and has something elemental about it, something impressive; for it is a moving sight to look upon heroic forms of men of strength and simplicity, in the worship of Nature, their God, as exemplified by the power of light and heat.” (The World’s Work, June 1911, p. 379) Others echoed the sentiment. In The Evening World, Henry Tyrrell described “a majestic old Indian on horseback turning with eyes and arms uplifted in devotional attitude toward the setting sun,” adding that “the artist reaches his grandest emotional height, in a composition of true epic quality, in which the inspiration of the theme has communicated itself to the technical execution, and the coloring is as gorgeous and glowing as in [Félix] Ziem’s Venice.” (The Evening World, April 15, 1911, p. 4)
The exhibition’s success marked a turning point. For years, Russell had been admired in the West but somewhat ambiguous in the East, where Remington’s reputation—cemented by his sudden death at 48 two years earlier—still dominated. Now the New York press spoke of him as a peer, if not a successor. Tyrrell opened his Evening World review with a knowing concession: “Comparison with the late Frederick Remington is inevitable, so we may as well have it over at once and say that Russell is slightly in the lead and still going strong.” (The Evening World, p. 4) The New York Tribune echoed the sentiment, noting that “Remington, we dare say, would have been the first to testify to this artist’s inborn gift for the rendering of movement [and] the stenographic notation of form.” (The New York Tribune, April 19, 1911) The Literary Digest went further: “The East may have thought that pictorially the West belongs to Remington, but out of that very quarter comes a man to dispute the monopoly.” (The Literary Digest, April 29, 1911, p. 843)
Beyond its immediate narrative, The Sun Worshippers embodies Russell’s broader philosophy of the West as a spiritual landscape. He viewed nature not as backdrop but as animate force, its rhythms intertwined with human endeavor. In the painting, the men’s gestures echo the sun’s ascent, their reverence extending the cycle of light across the canvas. Even the buffalo’s skeleton participates in the scene’s symbolic equilibrium—death rendered not as tragedy but as reminder of dependence. The work endures as a testament to Russell’s vision of the West as both living reality and poetic ideal.
Painted when the artist was nearing 46 years of age, The Sun Worshippers belongs to a period when Russell’s command of light and atmosphere neared its peak. He had long been known as the “Cowboy Artist,” but here he moved beyond the rough narrative of the frontier into something quieter, more reverential. As leading Russell authority Brian W. Dippie observes, “Russell frequently employed a distinctive lighting effect, a brilliant, raking light that illuminates peaks, valleys, and figures behind the foreground action.” Here, he reversed the dynamic entirely: sunlight becomes the action—the element around which every form coheres. “In The Sun Worshippers,” Dippie continues, “the Indians’ reverence for the source of creation mandates that all three men be fully bathed in the sun’s rich glow.” (The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell, Denver, Colorado, 2009, p. 187) The figures serve as vessels of illumination, their presence defined by the radiance that envelops them.
When The Sun Worshippers debuted at the Folsom Galleries in New York in the spring of 1911, it did so amid one of the greatest and most ambitious exhibitions of Russell’s career. Titled The West That Has Passed, the show represented his first major national appearance, orchestrated with precision by his wife, Nancy. For nearly three weeks, from April 12 to May 1, the artist’s vision of the American frontier filled the Fifth Avenue gallery: 13 oils, 12 watercolors, and six bronzes, each a testament to a world on the cusp of myth. The Sun Worshippers hung alongside now-canonical paintings—today housed in major museum collections—including The Medicine Man (1908) and The Smoke of a .45 (1908, both in the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas), When the Sioux and Blackfeet Meet (1908, Sid Richardson Museum, Fort Worth), and Jerked Down (1907) and The Wagon Boss (1909, both in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma).
Among the prominent collectors drawn to the exhibition was William Hinckle Smith of Philadelphia, who acquired several works, including The Sun Worshippers. In his correspondence with Smith, Russell elaborated on its meaning with the plainspoken poetry that ran through his letters: “All plains Indians, I think prayed to the sun, [they] were much more devout than their Christian white brothers. This painting represents the advance of a hunting party; the old man is asking the sun for success in the buffalo run. The sun is in the Sun River, or as the Indians call it, Medicine River Valley, in Montana. In the background is Sun River Buttes; in old times this was one of the favorite hunting grounds of the Blackfeet.” (Letter to W. Hinckle Smith, May 18, 1911) The specificity of the reference underscores Russell’s fidelity to lived experience. He was painting not an abstract “Indian ceremony,” but a ritual tied to a particular valley, tribe, and moment of day.
Russell’s empathy for Native American life runs throughout his work. From his earliest years in the Montana Territory, he had lived alongside the Blackfeet and other Plains tribes, observing their customs with a sensitivity rare among his white contemporaries. He rode, camped, and hunted with them, learning their sign talk and the words of their languages, and observing with care the cadence of their lives. Through long familiarity, he came to see Native life not as spectacle but as a complete and dignified order of being. To Russell, their rituals were not curiosities but expressions of a profound harmony with nature, an ethics of coexistence with the land they shared. By situating The Sun Worshippers within the real topography of the Sun River Valley, he transformed this moment of prayer into both homage and witness, fusing devotion to place with devotion to light itself.
In preparing The West That Has Passed, Nancy Russell proved herself not only her husband’s partner but his keenest strategist, attuned to the power of timing and presentation. America’s nostalgia for the frontier was at a fever pitch, and she positioned her husband not as the provincial “cowboy artist” but as a national chronicler of the West that had just slipped from view. To secure critical attention, she commissioned artist and art critic Arthur Hoeber to write the exhibition catalogue essay, along with several well-placed reviews in the press, which he published both anonymously and in his own right.
Hoeber’s glowing profile, “A Painter of the West,” praised Russell’s atmospheric power and singled out The Sun Worshippers as a picture of profound emotional resonance. “This composition,” he wrote, “is big in conception and has something elemental about it, something impressive; for it is a moving sight to look upon heroic forms of men of strength and simplicity, in the worship of Nature, their God, as exemplified by the power of light and heat.” (The World’s Work, June 1911, p. 379) Others echoed the sentiment. In The Evening World, Henry Tyrrell described “a majestic old Indian on horseback turning with eyes and arms uplifted in devotional attitude toward the setting sun,” adding that “the artist reaches his grandest emotional height, in a composition of true epic quality, in which the inspiration of the theme has communicated itself to the technical execution, and the coloring is as gorgeous and glowing as in [Félix] Ziem’s Venice.” (The Evening World, April 15, 1911, p. 4)
The exhibition’s success marked a turning point. For years, Russell had been admired in the West but somewhat ambiguous in the East, where Remington’s reputation—cemented by his sudden death at 48 two years earlier—still dominated. Now the New York press spoke of him as a peer, if not a successor. Tyrrell opened his Evening World review with a knowing concession: “Comparison with the late Frederick Remington is inevitable, so we may as well have it over at once and say that Russell is slightly in the lead and still going strong.” (The Evening World, p. 4) The New York Tribune echoed the sentiment, noting that “Remington, we dare say, would have been the first to testify to this artist’s inborn gift for the rendering of movement [and] the stenographic notation of form.” (The New York Tribune, April 19, 1911) The Literary Digest went further: “The East may have thought that pictorially the West belongs to Remington, but out of that very quarter comes a man to dispute the monopoly.” (The Literary Digest, April 29, 1911, p. 843)
Beyond its immediate narrative, The Sun Worshippers embodies Russell’s broader philosophy of the West as a spiritual landscape. He viewed nature not as backdrop but as animate force, its rhythms intertwined with human endeavor. In the painting, the men’s gestures echo the sun’s ascent, their reverence extending the cycle of light across the canvas. Even the buffalo’s skeleton participates in the scene’s symbolic equilibrium—death rendered not as tragedy but as reminder of dependence. The work endures as a testament to Russell’s vision of the West as both living reality and poetic ideal.