While many Montanans recognize the name and works of Charlie Russell, fewer are familiar with the name William Standing, who some historians consider his American Indian counterpart.

Standing, a full-blooded Assiniboine, who preferred his tribal name of Fire Bear, was a self-taught artist like Russell.

Standing is perhaps best known for his illustrations in the "Land of Nakoda: The Story of the Assiniboine Indians," a Depression-era, Federal Writer's Project book, written by a relative, James L. Long.

"They (the illustrations) are ironclad accurate," said George Oberst, Montana Historical Society curator of ethnology, an admirer Standing's work.

A handful of Standing's art is currently on display at the historical society as part of the Ed Craney Collection.

Many of Standing's high art pieces were bought by private collectors.

Standing's lack of formal art training may have proved his greatest strength.

He painted and drew what he saw, rather than what others wanted to see.

Other formally trained Indian artists of his time, "produced little more than elaborately costumed, idealized dancers or decorative symbols of the peyote religion," wrote John Ewers in a 1983 article in American Indian Art Magazine.

"Meanwhile, William Standing, working alone and largely unaided...was using three media to create landscapes, serious interpretations of aspects of tribal history and traditional culture, and incisive humorous interpretations of reservation life in his own time."

At times the pictures weren't flattering.

"Some people do not like the way I sometimes draw them," he wrote in a short and somewhat sardonic biographical sketch in "Land of Nakoda."

"Most of us do not look as handsome to others as we do to ourselves. But I like to be what is called an independent artist and draw and paint what I see."

A contemporary on the reservation described Standing's work in a 1938 Great Falls Tribune article.

"His work is depicting Indian faces and Indian life. In this he is true to life and does not attempt the fantastic nor the impossible. His Indians are realistic and often his pictures outrage our sense of beauty because his Indian maids are never portrayed in beautiful, snow white buckskin, sitting on a boulder and looking into a deep blue lake or stream. He paints such an Indian maid as being badly sunburned, covered with briar scratches and her raiment showing the effects of wear."

It is Standing's accurate illustrations that capture and help preserve what would have been the lost history of the Assiniboine.

"I can understand old-time Indian way of life and have tried to show it in the drawings for this book -- not the imitation Indian but the real one who hunted humpbacks (buffalo) in good old days," he wrote in the "Land of Nakoda."

"I asked old timers many questions about the way they cooked meat on a long-ago hunting party, or made a trap for the humpbacks, or dressed up for a grass dance; how bows and arrows looked, medicine pipes or old fashion leggings and moccasins with right designs -- not drug store imitations."

He then showed the drawings to the old timers for approval.

There were to be similar WPA history books about each of Montana's tribes. Unfortunately, only "Land of Nakoda" was completed and published by the State Publishing Company in 1942. The outbreak of World War II derailed the other projects, said the Historical Society's Oberst. "Land of Nakoda" has been reprinted several times, most recently just last year.

While Western artists, such as Frederic Remington earned more renown than Standing, their art wasn't as accurate.

"That was Remington's failure," said Oberst. "He was a trained artist, but he was wildly inaccurate ethnographically."

When either Russell or Standing painted an Indian, it was a specific Crow or Assiniboine Indian, Oberst said, not a generalized Indian.

In paintings such as "Reservation Scene" and "Buffalo" Standing's subjects and painting skill have been compared to Russell's works.

But Oberst sees other similarities between the artists, as well.

Both enjoyed drawing cartoons and caricatures and were known for their humor. Both chafed at the confines of a school room and formal education, but were well educated, particularly for their times. And both traveled extensively.

Standing's art work was exhibited in Montana, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Midwest, Washington D.C. and Paris.

Standing's life

Born in 1904, Standing was named after his grandfather, Fire Bear. However his white man's name, comes from his father, Standing Rattle.

But perhaps Standing Rattle's name for the artist proved the most fitting -- Looks in the Clouds.

He was sent to the agency day school near Oswego and later the Presbyterian Mission in Wolf Point.

"My tasks were irksome," he said in a 1938 Great Falls Tribune article, "for there was always present a lurking desire for the freedom of the open and for time to model in gumbo and clay and draw."

The schools were intent on more than teaching math and reading.

"Here I became more like a white man. I took off my leggings and the barbers cut my braids. Then many years later, when I went to Washington to exhibit paintings, the white men decided I looked too much like them and gave me horse hair braids to wear with my Indian clothes."

He also attended Haskell Institute in Kansas.

None of the schools nurtured his artistic ambitions.

"I was always painting and drawing but the only training which the teachers gave me in this line was jobs of painting the outside of buildings at the school," he wrote.

Standing was passionately interested in drawing and painting since he was a young child.

"A story is told that as a small boy I was often unruly," he wrote. "One evening my mother drew the face of an evil spirit on the bottom of a pan and set it in a corner to frighten me so that I would behave. Next morning I found the pan and erased the ugly face. With wood ashes, I drew a more kindly one. My drawing began at that early age."

By age 12, he would sell his first pen-and-ink drawings to local residents.

Early in Standing's artistic career, a local Oswego grocer, August 'Gus' Knapp, a German immigrant, would become his first patron.

Knapp, obtained art supplies for Standing and purchased more than a dozen of Standing's oil paintings.

Standing was happy when his formal schooling finally ended in 1924, and he could return to the reservation.

There, he pursued his art, wholeheartedly.

Throughout his life, Standing befriended tribal elders who told stories from their youth of hunting buffalo and riding out on raiding parties. It is these adventures that fired his artistic imagination.

In the late 1920s or early '30s, Standing arrived in Great Falls, as described in a Great Falls Tribune article, "with a bundle of paintings, the product of his uncultured artistic efforts and presented himself before the management of the second annual art exhibit with the request that he be permitted to show his output along with those of the more finished artists....

"Not only his pictures, but Standing himself attracted much attention."

Standing sold all his paintings at the exhibit, and received commissions for 20 more, the article reported.

Interspersed with his life on the reservation, he took trips to different parts of the United States.

"I drew sketches, selling one here and another there for scarcely enough to sustain myself and pay my way from town to town. These junkets took me to Illinois and Indiana cities, to St. Louis and elsewhere in the middlewest."

In 1931, at the age of 27 he had an art exhibit in Washington, D.C., and was part of the Colonial exposition in Paris.

Much of his life, Standing would live in a mud-daubed cabin on the Fort Peck Reservation. A log studio was attached to the house.

Often he'd finance himself by drawing and selling cartoon postcards, which were sold across the country.

During the 1930s, he not only illustrated the "Land of Nakoda" but also taught art class to children and adults on the reservation.

Standing proved a prolific artist, before he died at 46 in a car crash.

"Nature is my teacher," he said," during a 1938 interview. "It is from her that I get my colors. ... I invariably take my subjects from familiar scenes, episodes from the stories of my people dealing with epic and heroic feats in Indian history and tradition. I know what I draw and paint, and for critics to supplement my knowledge there is my aged father and many other aged friends.

"The only teacher I have been studying under all these years is nature, the only and best teacher I've ever known."

Standing's career was cut short by his death in a car crash near Zortman in 1951.

According to the program for a historical society exhibit following his death, "there are some who say this ... Assiniboine was just approaching the peak of his artistic ability."

Reporter Marga Lincoln: 447-4074 or marga.lincoln@helenair.com