Peter Hurd

The painter Peter Hurd was born in New Mexico and the scenery of the Southwest would be a significant theme of his work. Hurd studied at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from 1921 to 1923, leaving to study at Haverford College; he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and studied with N. C. Wyeth from 1924 to 1926. Hurd married Wyeth’s daughter, Henriette, in 1929, and the couple returned to New Mexico in the late 1930s. His paintings, primarily watercolors, chronicled the landscape of the region. In the early 1950s, he collaborated on a series of fresco murals at Texas Technological College (Texas Tech University). He was also a portrait painter, completing paintings of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Hurd’s interest in folk music led him to collaborate on an album, Spanish Folk Songs of New Mexico in 1957. His paintings are in a number of collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of the National Academy of Design, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was affiliated with the National Academy, the Wilmington Society of Fine Arts, and the American Watercolor Society; he received a first prize award for watercolors from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art holds many of his papers.