Edward Doheny died at age 79 on September 8, 1935. His devout Catholic wife, Estelle Doheny, took charge of all the art treasures, books, artifacts and ephemera that they had accumulated during their years together.

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In 1939 Pope Pius XII bestowed the title of papal countess on Estelle Doheny. And, in that same year, Mrs. Doheny donated the entire Doheny collection, including the Russell murals, to St. John’s Seminary. The seminary had been built on the hill overlooking Camarillo. Mrs. Doheny had also donated the funds to construct the building that was to house the Doheny collection. Thus the building and the collection came to be named the Edward Doheny Library.

The Russell and Samman murals were removed from the walls at 8 Chester Place in Los Angeles and were installed in the new Doheny Library in Camarillo. Since the room that the murals were put into was more than 20 feet long, another artist, whose name no one seems to have recorded, painted some end pieces for Samman’s murals. No additions were made to Russell’s work.

And there the Russell murals hung — all 40 feet of them — two of the Cowboy Artist’s greatest works, hidden and obscure, appreciated by only a handful of people who were lucky enough to see them, and with Russell’s “fixing” of the last mural all but forgotten.

Estelle Doheny died on October 30, 1958, and her will stipulated that 25 years after her death, St. John’s Seminary would no longer be required to keep the Doheny collection intact. Accordingly, between 1985 and 1988, the collection was sold.

Much of the major Old West art, as well as the remainder of the fabulous Doheny bequest and countless volumes of some of the earliest known books on the history of California, was sold by Christie’s of New York in a series of auctions that took place in 1987 and early in 1988. The Samman murals reportedly sold in February 1988 for $5,500.

But the Russell murals and some of the other major works

of art were sold in 1985 in a private pre-sale before the rest

of the art and the library were placed on the market via Christie’s auctions. According to sources who still prefer to remain anonymous, it was hoped that the murals and the other major works of art that were involved in the pre-sale would end up remaining together as permanent additions to the art collection at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum (now called the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum). But in a head-scratcher that allegedly had some officials at the Doheny Library and the museum dismayed and hot under the collar, the murals and additional major works by Russell, Frederic Remington and other artists ended up in the hands of private collectors.

Before the sale of the Russell murals in 1985, a professional photographer was brought in to shoot them, and a set of photographic copies of the real murals was mounted on Styrofoam and attached to the walls of the Doheny Library to

temporarily replace the real murals until the remainder of the vast collection was sold. No one, it seems, knows what happened to those photographic reproductions of the murals or who the photographer was.

The Russell murals changed hands several times after they left the Doheny Library, and their present owners were not involved in the controversy that surrounded the initial transaction that ultimately brought them the murals in 1989. The owners have even managed to keep the other major art works involved in the pre-sale together with the murals as the “crown jewels” of what remains of the Doheny collection.

The present owners prefer to keep a low profile. But they also felt that the public should at least have a first-and-last chance to see and appreciate Russell’s last great works. Accordingly, the murals were displayed in 1989 at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track and at the Museum of the Horse in Ruidoso Downs, N.M. They were then exhibited for a couple of months in Wichita, Kan., at the end of 1993, as well as at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage (now the Museum of the American West) in Los Angeles during January, February and March 1994. After that, the murals were installed in the private home of their owners, and it is not known when, or if, the murals will ever be put on public display again.

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