In this work Russell skillfully depicted the wild contortions of a bucking horse known to skilled bronc riders as a “sunfisher.” According to historian Ramon Adams, such a horse twisted his body downward “to try to touch the ground with first one shoulder and then the other, letting the sunlight hit his belly.” Russell claimed to have firsthand knowledge of being thrown around by a wildly bucking horse. At one point he wrote his friend the writer Will James: “I never got to be a bronc rider but in my youthful days wanted to be and while that want lasted, I had a fine chance to study hoss anatomy from under and over. The under was a view the terrapin gets. The over while hovered at the end of a McCarty rope was like the eagle sees—grand but damn scary for folks without wings. And what I wanted was the saddle horn and it was far, far below me. Maybe you’v been thair, looking down on a hoss with plenty of legs but no head. They used to play peek-a-boo with me lots.” The composition of the bronze is a clever one, for by having the horse’s head touch the base Russell was able to lift three of its legs off the ground in a daring display of artistic balance. The tensile strength of the bronze allowed the artist to challenge the law of gravity. The bronze was first exhibited in March 1924 at the Biltmore Salon in Los Angeles, and a copy became the prized possession of the artist’s friend and admirer the noted humorist Will Rogers. Approximately eight casts were produced by Roman Bronze Works in New York before Nancy Russell shifted her casting activity to Los Angeles following her husband’s death in 1926. Three or four copies of the bronze bearing the mark of the California Art Bronze Foundry have been located, including one that belonged to the actor James Cagney. The example reproduced here from the Amon Carter Museum collection—originally part of the Nancy Russell estate—does not bear a foundry mark, but its details correspond to those found on the California casts.