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The Golden Age of American illustration wasn’t limited to popular periodicals of the era. Charles Russell and Frederic Remington also contributed illustrations for different book projects. In 1902, Remington painted Days on the Range to serve as the frontispiece for Alfred Henry Lewis’s book Wolfville Days. The scene portrayed in Remington’s canvas relates to the 19th chapter in the book, “When the Stage was Stopped.” In this last section of the book, the narrator describes a long-winded tale about stagecoach robberies and holdups. In the story, the townspeople of Wolfville devise a scheme to trick one of the suspected bandits, [...]

The Golden Age of American Illustration began in the 1880s and lasted into the mid-twentieth century. During this time, New York replaced London as the center of illustrated periodicals published in the English language. Technological advances allowed for inexpensive yet high quality images to be reproduced easily and distributed to a wide audience through magazines like the popular Harper’s Magazine, Century Magazine, and Collier’s. And Frederic Remington and Charles Russell were on hand to contribute their art! Remington’s first commercial illustration appeared in an 1882 issue of Harper’s Weekly, and just a handful of years later, Russell’s first illustration was [...]

Though Frederic Remington and Charles Russell are known today as fine artists, both worked as illustrators throughout their careers, creating paintings en grisaille, or in black & white, intended for reproduction to accompany stories and text. Our new exhibition – Remington and Russell in Black and White – features an array of both artists’ original greyscale masterworks paired with their counterparts printed in magazines and books. During Remington & Russell’s time, illustrated magazines and books garnered wide popularity in the U.S., and thus earned the moniker The Golden Age of American Illustration, which began in the 1880s and lasted into [...]

Recently, I was spending some time walking with a colleague around our current exhibition, Charles M. Russell: Storyteller Across Media. We were lingering in one corner of the gallery that highlights a collection of objects and artworks centered around the subject of “counting coup.” What is counting coup? Counting coup was a system of graduated points wherein the first man to touch an enemy was awarded a first coup or “direct hit.” To count coup, one might use his hand, bow, lance, or perhaps rattles or whips.   Charles M. Russell | Counting Coup (Medicine Whip) | 1902 | [...]