ARTWORK:
Duke Ellington (1899-1974), painted in 1956 by American painter, Peter Hurd (1904-1984), #BornOnThisDay.
Tempera on board
48 x 34 cm, 19 x 15 in approx
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
Peter Hurd’s 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.
He was commissioned to create numerous portraits including this painting of Duke Ellington which appeared on the cover of the 20 August 1956 edition of Time Magazine (image in comments).
In his Publisher’s Letter, James A Linen wrote:
“The portrait of Duke Ellington is the first TIME cover by one of the West’s most distinguished artists, New Mexico’s Peter Hurd. A LIFE correspondent during World War II, Hurd has painted on all five continents, but the people and scenes he likes best to portray are the ranch folk, the sun-blazed desert and the bare mountains near his New Mexican ranch. His precise tempera paintings of the US Southwest and its people are owned by such leading museums as New York City’s Metropolitan, Kansas City’s William Rockhill Nelson and the National Gallery in Edinburgh. For Hurd, a classical-music fan, the Ellington assignment was his first brush with the world of jazz. He caught up with the Duke in San Francisco and spent the first two days trying to corner the elusive but affable musician. “Hi, Hurd. You’re the portrait man. Well, fine. Excuse me, I have to see that cat over there,” Ellington would say and fade away. But once the portrait was started, Ellington liked to pose as he held court for his innumerable friends in the artist’s hotel room.”
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In his late teens, Peter Hurd attended the US Military Academy at West Point, NY, resigning after two years to pursue a career in painting.
During a term at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he made the acquaintance of the renowned illustrator, NC Wyeth, who lived in the area, and subsequently apprenticed in his studio. At Wyeth’s urging he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1924.
In 1929 Hurd married Wyeth’s eldest daughter, Henriette, herself a painter.
The influence of his mentor’s heightened realistic style was strong in Hurd’s illustrations for children’s books in the late 1920s. During the early ’30s he began experimenting with egg tempera. He found the vivid New Mexico light and landscape of his childhood profoundly conducive to his art and resettled there with his family in the ’30s. In his later paintings, Hurd continued to work in watercolors, egg tempera, and lithographs and remained a steadfast realist, perfecting an anonymous, dry, luministic technique for evoking the arid expanse of his native territory.