Anne Morand | Your Friend, C.M. Russell

Published: January 20, 2009

What a pleasure it must have been to receive a hand-rendered greeting or illustrated letter from Charlie Russell. And the artist must have enjoyed crafting these missives as well, for he created more than 500 pieces of illustrated correspondence.  

The C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls has 59 of these letters and holiday cards in its permanent collections, and has reproduced each of the watercolor or pen-and-ink drawings in Your Friend, C.M. Russell: The C.M. Russell Museum Collection of Illustrated Letters.

The large-format book also includes biographical sketches and photographs of many of the recipients, as a well as transcriptions of the more complex letters. While the artist’s colorful vernacular is intact, “spelling has been modernized and punctuation has been added, not in an effort to ‘correct’ his work, but to make certain passages easier to understand,” says museum director Anne Morand in the introduction.

These colorful vignettes, and the chatty notes and letters that accompany them, reveal much about the artist and his life. Illustrations poke fun at his schoolboy years in St. Louis, evoke his cowboy adventures in Montana, and revel in the exotic sights he beheld during regular trips to New York City with his wife, Nancy.

Some of the most detailed letters, often addressed to his close friend Albert Trigg, “seem to reveal more of himself and his reactions to his new experiences,” writes Morand.

His many Christmas and New Year’s greetings, on the other hand, reflect the artist’s generous and sociable nature, and penchant for humor and whimsy. “Holiday greetings were some of Charlie Russell’s favorite creations to send to friends; he often began painting them as early as October each year,” notes Morand.

At first, he sent small, card-sized greetings to his many friends, which later became much more elaborate, and in later years, expressed his growing chagrin with the growing commercialism of Christmas. A poem that accompanied a card created in 1918, says, in part:

“Love is a giver of gift,

With friendship his husky mate

It’s the slices of heart that you get with a gift

That gives any gift its weight.”

In a sense, the museum is giving back the gift of Russell’s own words and illustrations in this light-hearted, yet revealing collection.

The book was published by the C.M. Russell Museum and sells for $30 softcover and $40 hardcover; visit www.cmrussell.org.

– Kristi Niemeyer