Southwestern Son: The Lithographs of Peter Hurd

The artist Peter Hurd is often noted for his experiments in egg tempera painting and particularly for introducing Andrew Wyeth to the medium with which he would become so closely associated. An inquisitive artist, Hurd taught himself not only the traditional methods of tempera but also the late eighteenth-century printmaking technique of lithography.

Much less well known than his paintings, Hurd’s prints reflect a brief period of his life’s work in the 1930s, when he turned to lithography to support his young family during the Depression. During this period, Hurd split his time between San Patricio, in his native New Mexico, and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the family home of his wife, the artist Henriette Wyeth. Though he worked on many of the prints in Pennsylvania, nearly all of them represent scenes of ranch life in New Mexico. The exhibition will feature twenty-four of Hurd’s rarely seen Southwestern lithographs, as well as a selection of his drawings and temperas of similar subjects from the same period which will provide unique insight into his artistic process.