HAND SIGNED & NUMBERED SERIGRAPH. Peter Hurd (February 22, 1904 - July 9, 1984) was an American painter whose work is strongly associated with the people and landscapes of San Patricio, New Mexico, where he lived from the 1930s. He is equally acclaimed for his portraits and his western landscapes.Early in his life, Hurd studied in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania under the noted illustrator N.C. Wyeth, along with two of his grown children. Hurd later married the painter's eldest daughter, Henriette Wyeth, who also is known as an accomplished painter. During World War II, Hurd worked for Life magazine as a war correspondent attached to the US Air Force. He created hundreds of "War Sketches". Some of Hurd’s most well-known portraits were of his neighbors, family, and friends at Sentinel Ranch. He loved to paint people who were deeply connected to the land, and always showed them outdoors, against the hills and sky. He wrote, “the ones I like best to paint are those whose lives are spent under the sky: Men whose clothing, skin and eyes are all conditioned by the wind.” His Portrait of Jose shows the foreman of Sentinel Ranch amid the ridges of the land he cared for. In what is perhaps Hurd’s hallmark work, Eve of St. John, Herrera’s daughter is bathed in the light of a candle she carries. From 1953 to 1954, Hurd was commissioned for a major mural by Texas Technological College (now Texas Tech University) in Lubbock, Texas. He and his assistants painted the fresco mural in the rotunda of what was then the West Texas Museum (now Holden Hall). Hurd completed about one fresco per week over a two-year period, depicting pioneers and influential leaders of West Texas.Hurd also was commissioned to paint the official portraits of two heads of state, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. LBJ famously rejected the 1967 Hurd portrait, for reasons unknown. This painting is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, of the Smithsonian Institution.Many of Hurd's works, along with those of his wife Henriette Wyeth, father-in-law N.C. Wyeth, and son Michael Hurd, can be seen at the Hurd-La Rinconada Gallery in San Patricio, New Mexico.

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26 x 29 in