Charles Marion Russell was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a family with a fur-trading background on his mother’s side and a wealthy coal-mining entrepreneurial father.

His early life cleaves close to a stereotypical narrative of the rebellious youth with cowboy ambitions: he dropped out of military school after one term (after bribing classmates with art to do his work for him) and then started sheep-ranching in Montana at the age of sixteen. Although his family hoped he would regret his decision, he ended up staying in the area for two years with a trapper he met in the woods (yes, really), and with only short, occasional visits home, began working as a cattle rancher. At the time, Russell had no plans of being a professional artist, but did take night shifts so that he could take advantage of daylight to draw and paint the surrounding landscape and scenes from daily cowboy life. He gave away works to friends and family in lieu of writing full letters, or would use his art to pay frontier brothel workers for their services.

Russell’s first break into the limelight came after the particularly long and cold winter of 1886-87. In order to represent the freezing temperatures that killed huge swaths of cattle, he produced a watercolor sketch of a starving cow in the snow to be sent back East in reply to a letter. The image was so evocative of the painful season that thousands of copies were passed around in awe, and led to Russell’s first official commissions.

Immediately after this first brush with fame, the artist spent six months living with a group of Káínáwa people in Alberta, and the connections he formed there likely led to his tendency to treat indigenous Americans relatively respectfully for the time in his artwork and daily life. By 1893, Russell was receiving enough high-paying commissions for his cowboy art that he could stop cattle-ranching. He married a woman named Nancy Cooper in 1896. At the time, he was 32 and she was 18, which definitely raises some questions about motivations and power differentials in the relationship.

Despite the age gap, Nancy quickly fell into the role of Russell’s financial advisor, pushing him to visit New York regularly and attempt to sell his paintings—she wanted to be able to finance her dream of having a house in California. Although he had to compete with Frederick Remington, another “cowboy artist,” by the 1910s Russell was considerably successful, with his art appearing in places as tacky as mass-produced calendars and as momentous as the Montana House of Representatives. During this time he also created bronze-cast sculptural works and semi-autobiographical writing, although by most accounts his writing was subpar compared to his visual art.

Russell died of a heart attack on October 24, 1926. His work is still popular, reflecting many Americans’ romanticization of and nostalgia for the “Wild West” era of U.S. history.