Amon G. Carter Collection

The museum was founded around Amon G. Carter Sr.’s extensive collection of more than 400 artworks by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Mr. Carter had been introduced to the artists’ work by his good friend, the actor and humorist Will Rogers, who had been close to Russell during the painter’s lifetime.

Mr. Carter began collecting art in 1935, when he acquired His First Lesson along with a group of nine Russell watercolors. His collection quickly expanded to include some of the artist’s best-known works. In 1941, he acquired a selection of artworks from the estate of Russell’s widow, Nancy Cooper Russell. Four years later, he purchased A Dash for the Timber from Washington University in Saint Louis, and in 1948 he acquired Buffalo Hunt [No. 39], a picture formerly owned and beloved by Rogers. In 1964, Cyrus Rowlett (C. R.) Smith, a close friend of Mr. Carter’s and the president of American Airlines, gifted a selection of Russell sculptures and illustrated letters to the museum, further enriching what was already one of the finest museum collections of Russell’s and Remington’s art.