Charles M Russell was self-taught. More than that, he was self-made. Not in the by his bootstraps, rags to riches, captain of Industry way, but in the literal sense. Russell made himself. He adopted history, the history of the west, as his second father and mother. He plucked a persona from the stories of old timers who blazed the frontier and the paintings of Deas and Wimar that hung in his native St. Louis—gateway to the west, trailhead of dreams—paintings of mountain men and trappers and cowboys and he molded that persona as surely as he molded clay into horses and men, he wrangled that persona into the shape of a truly authentic artist with an original inimitable vision. It is often said that Russell’s images best preserve the spirit of the Old West. It might equally be said that it is Russell’s images that created our conception of the Old West.

We forget that. We give in to the temptation to take Charlie Russell at face value, which is to say, we take him and his art for granted. In his own lifetime, art critics admitted that the artist was the cowboy and the cowboy was the artist. Nothing is hidden… There are the horses, splendid animals; there are the riders, splendid men. The sky is subtle, the rocks and brush are perfect but unobtrusive, the colors are vivid and expertly balanced. We talk about these things, about technique and perhaps say something about the simple joy the work elicits from us and lament the simpler, better era the scene reveals. And we leave it at that. Then we, who never knew him, wish we had. And then we smile and call him “Charlie.”

Self-effacing “Charlie “made it look easy. But that doesn’t mean it was.

By 1906, the year he painted Smoking Them Out, Russell, already widely celebrated, had been to New York. He’d worked in the studio of the eminent illustrator John Marchand (who had invited him to come to New York) and had met many of the greatest artists of the day. He’d made tentative forays into bronzes and he’d begun to absorb and make use of the constructive criticism that came his way.

In Smoking Them Out, the cowboys and the herd are composed in a deliberate shallow v above and on either side of the deep shadowed v of the dry ravine. The shadow of the ravine and the shadow of the weathered bank of the trail form an opposing shallow v. that connects cowboys with cattle. One cowboy has fired his six shooter, a second is about to fire his, a third approached on the spur. Part of the herd is up and out of the ravine, a few cows scramble up. We don’t know how many more are down there.

It’s dry. The all but cloudless pale blue sky is a sky without rain. The grasses and brush are pale green and yellow, without lushness. Smoking Them Out is much more than just an action scene. It depicts a moment of deadly seriousness as the cowboys race to keep the herd moving, save the herd from scattering, from drought, from death. Though they are physically far from one another, Russell orchestrates the composition, herds the paint—the colors, the shapes, the textures—so that cowboys and cattle are right next to one another in the picture plane. The lives of the cattle are one with the livelihoods of the cowboys. They ride the same trail. Russell has “smoked” this painting out of the shadow of its conception in his own mind, his own cowboy past, and the past he created and has bequeathed to us.

“Charlie” makes Charles M’s painstaking labors look easy. But that doesn’t mean it is.