Painter of the Southwest
Legendary artist Peter Hurd is the focus of Las Cruces museum’s exhibition
When it comes to legendary New Mexico artists, rightfully, Peter Hurd is in the same league as Georgia O’Keeffe.
Hurd is known for his proficiency in various mediums, including oil, lithography, watercolor, egg tempura and charcoal.
At the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Musuem in Las Cruces, the latest exhibit — “Drawn to the Land: Peter Hurd’s New Mexico” — features 24 paintings and some of his belongings.
On display are some of his palettes with brushes, a pair of chaps, boots, sombrero, guitar, and polo helmet and mallet.
The show, which includes loans from the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery in San Patricio and the El Paso Museum of Art, also features a video about Hurd.
The exhibit runs through Sept. 13 at the museum.
“We’re so pleased to present the work of Peter Hurd at the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum,” says Lisa Pugh, the museum’s chief curator. “Through his portraits and paintings, Hurd celebrated a uniquely New Mexican way of life and depicted the inexplicable beauty of the southern high plains in a way no other artist could.”
Hurd, who was born and raised in the Roswell area, settled in the Hondo Valley after attending West Point, serving as a war artist correspondent during World War II, and living in Pennsylvania, where he met his wife, Henriette Wyeth.
The artist is celebrated for his realistic portraits and luminous Southwestern landscapes that feature the vegetation, rolling hills, windmills, water tanks and ever-changing skies of Lincoln and Chaves counties.
“If a work of art represents a particular artist’s view of the world, Peter Hurd’s work conveys how inspired he was by nature and his surroundings,” says Holly Radke, the Museum’s Collections Manager who curated the exhibit. “He is best-known as a regionalist painter who captured the hardworking people and landscapes of southeastern New Mexico.”
Radke says Hurd was attached to New Mexico.
“To the land, the people and the diverse culture, he was known to go out into the hills on his horse and take his watercolors to create studies,” Radke says. “There are some of the studies on exhibit. He would do dozens of studies and then use them to create larger paintings.”
Light was critically
important in Hurd’s work, and he strove to render it accurately.
He felt that the medium of egg tempera allowed him to truly capture the shifting light and arid landscape of New Mexico.
“Peter was about capturing a moment in time,” Radke says. “It’s spectacular the way he captured the land. Being here in New Mexico, we’re very familiar with the landscape. He was a realist and painted just as he saw it.”
There are many fascinating facets to Hurd’s life.
When he and his wife bought the ranch in the Hondo Valley, it needed a lot of work.
“While he received awards and money for his portraits, he would use that to renovate the ranch,” Radke says. “He had his own studio. He went to New Mexico Military Institute and was introduced to polo. He fell in love with the sport. He raised polo ponies and had two polo fields on his working ranch. He was also very conscious about soil and water conservation.”
By the time of his death in 1984, Hurd had become synonymous with New Mexico.
His obituary in The New York Times was headlined, “Peter Hurd, Painter of Southwest.”