Portrait Artist Montana

Montana Counties Hazel Paints Portraits In

Beaverhead, Big Horn, Blaine, Broadwater, Carbon, Carter, Cascade, Chouteau, Custer, Daniels, Dawson, Deer Lodge, Fallon, Fergus, Flathead, Gallatin, Garfield, Glacier, Golden Valley, Granite, Hill, Jefferson, Judith Basin, Lake, Lewis and Clark, Liberty, Lincoln, Madison, McCone, Meagher, Mineral, Missoula, Musselshell, Park, Petroleum, Phillips, Pondera, Powder River, Powell, Prairie, Ravalli, Richland, Roosevelt, Rosebud, Sanders, Sheridan, Silver Bow, Stillwater, Sweet Grass, Teton, Toole, Treasure, Valley, Wheatland, Wibaux and Yellowstone.

Towns in Montana Where Hazel’s Portrait Clients Live

Bozeman, Big Sky, Belgrade, Manhattan, Three Forks, Livingston, Paradise Valley, Emigrant, Pray, Gardiner, Ennis, Big Sky Meadow Village, Whitefish, Kalispell, Bigfork, Lakeside, Polson, Columbia Falls, Somers, Missoula, Bitterroot Valley, Hamilton, Stevensville, Darby, Helena, Townsend, Great Falls, Choteau, Dupuyer, Augusta, Billings, Red Lodge, Absarokee, Big Timber, Melville, Roundup, Miles City, Glendive, Sidney, Lewistown, Butte, Anaconda, Philipsburg, Deer Lodge, Dillon, Twin Bridges, Sheridan MT, Eureka, Troy, Libby, Seeley Lake and Ovando.

Charles M. Russell and the Painted West in Montana

Montana had a painter who was also a working cowhand, and it made all the difference. Charles M. Russell spent eleven years wrangling horses before he ever sold a picture, and when he painted a man on a horse he painted someone he had ridden beside.

The land is Blackfeet, Crow, Salish, Kootenai, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Northern Cheyenne and Little Shell homeland, and seven reservations remain within the state. Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri in 1805. Gold at Bannack in 1862 and copper at Butte after 1880 brought the first rush of money; the open-range cattle years ran from the 1870s until the catastrophic winter of 1886 to 1887 killed most of the herds in the state.

Russell recorded that winter in a postcard-sized watercolour. Asked by an absentee owner how the cattle were faring, the foreman sent back a small sketch of a starving steer with wolves waiting - Waiting for a Chinook. It said everything, and it made Russell’s name. He went on to paint some four thousand works, married Nancy Cooper, who managed his career shrewdly, and by his death in 1926 was nationally famous. The C. M. Russell Museum at Great Falls holds his log studio.

A second painter matters here as much. Winold Reiss, a German-born artist working from the 1920s, painted several hundred portraits of Blackfeet men and women in Glacier country - full-face, in pastel, named individuals rather than types. The Great Northern Railway reproduced them on calendars that hung in kitchens across America for decades. As a body of portraiture it is remarkable, and much of it is at the Montana Historical Society in Helena.

Joseph Henry Sharp, who later helped found the Taos Society, kept a studio at Crow Agency near the Little Bighorn from 1902, painting Crow and Cheyenne sitters over many years. Edgar Paxson at Missoula did the same. There is a longer and more serious tradition of portraiture in Montana than the state ever gets credit for.

The institutions are good and unusually spread out: the C. M. Russell Museum at Great Falls, the Montana Historical Society in Helena with its Mackay Collection of Russells, the Yellowstone Art Museum at Billings, the Missoula Art Museum, the Holter in Helena and the Hockaday at Kalispell. The Russell Auction each March in Great Falls is one of the significant Western art sales in the country.

Butte deserves its own paragraph. At its height it was the richest hill on earth, producing a third of the copper in the United States, with a population approaching a hundred thousand and thirty-eight nationalities in it. The Copper Kings - Daly, Clark, Heinze - built houses to prove a point, and W. A. Clark’s mansion on West Granite Street still stands with its stained glass and frescoed ceilings intact.

Modern Montana money is different. Ranching families who have held the same ground for four and five generations, and newcomers who arrived over the last thirty years for the Paradise Valley, the Gallatin, the Bitterroot and the Flathead. Both commission, and they want quite different pictures.

The geography of that is clear enough. Bozeman, Big Sky and the Gallatin valley. Livingston and Paradise Valley. Whitefish, Bigfork and Flathead Lake. Missoula and the Bitterroot down to Hamilton and Darby. The Boulder and Sweet Grass country around Big Timber and Melville, which has some of the oldest continuous ranch families in the state. Red Lodge and the Beartooth front. Helena and Great Falls.

Institutional work exists too: Montana State at Bozeman, the University of Montana at Missoula, Montana Tech at Butte, Carroll College, the state capitol in Helena with its Russell mural of Lewis and Clark meeting the Salish, the federal courts and the older Helena and Billings firms.

The distinctive Montana commission is a working portrait. A rancher with a horse he has bred, a family on their own ground with the Front or the Bridgers behind them, a stock dog, a saddle horse painted with the same care a Thoroughbred gets in Kentucky. These are not costume pictures. The clothes are the clothes the sitter actually wears.

Russell was blunt about what he was doing. He called himself an illustrator and said the West he painted was already gone. He was right about the second part and wrong about the first, and Montana has been proving him wrong about it ever since.