2025 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction38 / 48 • View Catalog •
Prev Lot
•
Next Lot 
VERSO
Label, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
The Chase is included in the C. M. Russell Catalogue Raisonné as number CR.PC.96.
Russell authority Peter H. Hassrick wrote, “Of the recurrent themes in Russell’s oeuvre, none was more thoroughly explored than the buffalo hunt. Except for a few early works in which Anglo hide hunters were portrayed in the methodical decimation of the herds, buffalo hunting for Russell was generally a grand enterprise reserved for the pre-reservation Indian. That Indian, symbolizing the Rousseauian natural man, was the single most significant symbol of the West for Russell. Such traditions as the buffalo hunt were far more profound than any of the ephemeral proficiencies of his fellow cowboys, and these traditions represented timeless and universal values that only the arts could preserve. Civilization had crushed the plains cultures. Despite the fact that the artist’s vocation as a cowboy had indirectly caused the final depletion of the bison, Russell followed a self-enlightened mandate to celebrate and preserve the Indian image as noble. Just as he struggled to humanize the cowboy, he strove to idealize the Indian.”
PROVENANCE
The artist
Mrs. C. R. Scudder, St. Louis, Missouri
S. Cupples Scudder, Santa Barbara, California, by descent
Sotheby’s, New York, New York, 1993
Private collection, Northern California
Bonham’s, Los Angeles, California, 2014
Private collection, Wyoming
EXHIBITED
Santa Barbara Collects, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, 1985
LITERATURE
Santa Barbara Collects, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1985, p. 22, listed
