Olaf Carl Seltzer

1877 - 1957

Olaf Seltzer was born in Copenhagen. When he was 12 years-old he studied art at the Det Tekniske Institut (The Technical Institute) in Copenhagen. Seltzer was 19 years-old when his father died and his mother and he emigrated to Great Falls, Montana, where he would live and work for nearly all of the remainder of his life. Seltzer worked for a year as a cowboy, supplying horses to the Yellowstone Stage Lines. He then got a job as a machinist and later a locomotive repairman for the Great North Railway, where he worked for nearly a quarter century. All the while he maintained an interest in art, sketching in his spare time.

It was in Great Falls that Olaf Seltzer met and became close friends with Charles Russell. They would go on hunting and sketching trips together and to the casual observer Seltzer’s work can be mistaken for Russell’s work.

It wasn’t until he was in his mid 40s and he’d lost his job with the railroad as part of a massive layoff that Seltzer began painting full-time. Just before he turned 50, Seltzer moved to New York City to assist Charles Russell in completing some of his commissions. It was while in New York City that Seltzer was introduced to Dr. Philip Cole, who was Russell’s patron and would become Seltzer’s friend and greatest patron. When Russell died not long after his arrival to New York City, Seltzer returned to Great Falls, Montana, though he maintained a relationship with Dr. Cole for the remainder of Dr. Cole’s life. More than 2,500 Olaf Seltzer paintings are known, including a series of 103 miniatures on Montana history commissioned by Dr. Cole, whose Western Art collection included 340 works by Seltzer, nearly half of the entire collection.

Dr. Cole had lived and practiced medicine in Helena, Montana Territory as a young man and always harbored the dream of returning. But, his role as President of A. Schrader & Son, the company he inherited from his father and the manufacturer of the schrader valves used on nearly all tire innertubes, kept him in New York. However, his wealth did afford him the opportunity to assemble a massive Western art collection and even build a replica of a Montana ranch in Lake Placid, New York, which he named Last Chance Ranch after Last Chance Gulch, the original name for Helena, Montana.

Today, Steve Seltzer continues his grandfather Olaf’s tradition as a very successful Western artist.

EVENING AT THE FORT Watercolor on Paper 7 ¾ x 12 inches