EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 27 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

68 Russell had not yet achieved national recognition). In the winter of 1911, he complained that a sliver of chicken bone got lodged between his gums. The bone was eventually removed, but his health deteriorated from then on, until he died from blood poisoning on January 27, 1912, at the age of fifty-one. Schreyvogel wasn’t as prolific an artist as Remington. His studio was the flat, tar roof of a narrow house in Hoboken, thousands of miles from the Great Plains. He painted less than a hundred canvases and executed only a few bronzes. And most importantly, he refused to work for magazines or journals, considering that at the time there was no technical way to reproduce faithfully any of his paintings. Even in times of hardship, when he and his wife were living on thirteen cents, he refused to accept commissions for illustrations. He was also determined that every canvas should be historically accurate. He always did painstaking research before beginning work on a canvas. He was a tireless, precise researcher and interviewed Indian chiefs and braves, officers, and troopers who had taken part in historical battles. Yet, after all this, he has remained forgotten all these years, and his paintings, although valued in six-figure sums, have sold in recent auctions for only tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes life isn’t fair. ● ● The only book ever done on Schreyvogel’s work was ‘The Life and Art of Charles Schreyvogel: Painter-Historian of the Indian-Fighting Army of the American West’ by James D. Horan, published in 1969, and obviously out of print. This book is gigantic (16 by 12 inches), and might be found in antique bookshops. Unfortunately the colour printing back then doesn’t do Schreyvogel’s work any justice, although the images are reproduced at a large size .