Back-Tracking in Memory
Back-Tracking in Memory
The Life of Charles M. Russell, Artist Recollections, Reflections and Personal Perspectives by Nancy Cooper Russell
Edited by Tom Petrie & Brian Dippie
7” x 10”, pages, Hardcover with dust jacket
ISBN: 978-1-59152-288-1
$40.00
She was eighteen, effectively an orphan, and he was thirty-two, a former cowboy from a good family in St. Louis struggling to make his living as an artist. She would be by his side for the rest of his life as his wife, cheerleader, and extraordinarily capable business manager. When he died in Great Falls, Montana, in 1926, shortly after they celebrated their thirtieth anniversary, Charlie Russell was at the top of the heap, an American original world famous as the “Cowboy Artist.” A few months earlier Nancy had written an acquaintance who remembered her from her hardscrabble youth in Helena, “Yes, I am, or was, the little girl you were talking about, way back in ’94. . . . I, as you know, married the only Charles Russell in the world and my life has been very full of romance, which they like to make moving pictures out of, only mine happens to be real.” She realized that with Charlie’s passing, it was up to her to keep that dream alive by keeping him alive...
About the Editors
Thomas A. Petrie, is a former Chair of the C.M. Russell Museum Board of Directors. For over twenty years, he has served as a Trustee of the Denver Art Museum, where he helped establish the Petrie Institute of Western American Art. Mr. Petrie supported the publication of such important works as Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné (2007), The Masterworks of Charles M. Russell: A Retrospective of Painting and Sculpture (2009), C.M. Russell: The Women in His Life and Art (2018), and Return To Calgary: Charles M. Russell And The 1919 Victory Stampede (2019). Mr. Petrie, with over twenty years of governance involvement with the C.M. Russell Museum, is co-chair of the museum’s Art & Soul Capital Campaign that is currently under way.
Brian W. Dippie, a retired professor of History at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, has been fascinated by the art of Charles M. Russell for more than seventy years now. He first published on Russell in 1973 and considers helping Tom Petrie bring Nancy Russell’s biography of Charlie into print the perfect capstone to a long career.