Drawn to the Land: Peter Hurd’s New Mexico

Legendary New Mexico artist Peter Hurd is featured in this exhibit in the Museum’s Traditions Gallery.

"Drawn to the Land: Peter Hurd’s New Mexico" features 24 paintings and some of the artist’s belongings, including one of his palettes, a pair of chaps, sombrero, guitar, and polo helmet and mallet.

The show, which includes loans from the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery in San Patricio, N.M., and the El Paso Museum of Art, also features a video about Hurd (1904-1984).

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 the area in Lincoln and Chaves counties.

Unlike many artists who are proficient in a few mediums, Hurd was skilled in a variety of media including oil, lithography, watercolor, egg tempera, and charcoal. Light was critically important in Hurd’s work and he strove to render it accurately. Hurd felt that the medium of egg tempera allowed him to truly capture the shifting light and arid landscape of New Mexico.