A Ranch on the Ruidoso

“WE DO NOT REFLECT AS WE RAISE A WINDMILL, or break a pony, or drill an oil-well, or irrigate a field, or cultivate an orchard, that all life, any life, everywhere and anywhere, is worthy of record in works of art,” Paul Horgan wrote in the January 1961 issue of New Mexico Magazine. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Great River, who grew up with Peter Hurd in Roswell, added that the draw of his friend’s artwork is rooted in its locality. “He has said to us, ‘This is your life, here are your plains, your skies, your ranches, your mountains, the meaning of your weather, and the outward stuff of your work and your land.’ ”

Hurd may have needed to go east as a young man to fully appreciate the gifts of the land where he was raised. At age 17, after graduating from the New Mexico Military Institute, in Roswell, he headed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Two years later, he dropped out to pursue a career in art, graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and apprenticing privately with N.C. Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he fell in love with a young Henriette Wyeth.

In the early 1930s, the newly married couple moved to Hurd’s hometown, where the Military Institute had commissioned him for a mural (later lost to fire). With his earnings, Hurd bought 40 acres and an adobe hacienda 50 miles west of Roswell, in the almost impossibly bucolic San Patricio, thereby staking his claim to a place-based artistic dynasty that is now going on 91 years.

“He just felt the draw was here,” says Caroline Brooks, executive director of the Roswell Museum. Hurd also sought to move back to the Southwest to distinguish himself from the Wyeth family, who were established American artistic royalty, and carve out his own path. “He was trying to convince Henriette to move to this remote location,” Brooks says. “She had her society, friends, and family in Pennsylvania. It took a long time to convince both her and her father that it was okay for her to move out here.”

In the Roswell area, Hurd often traded paintings for services. “That’s how there ended up being so much of his artwork here and in the surrounding area,” Brooks says. Throughout the 1930s and after the couple permanently moved to San Patricio in 1940, both he and Henriette chased assignments and commissions, having self-exiled from the art world’s business hub in the Northeast.

During World War II, Hurd flew around the world as a Life magazine correspondent with the U.S. Air Force. In 1943, his brother-in-law, Andrew Wyeth, taught him to use watercolors to document fleeting moments. Henriette allowed Hurd’s art career to take precedence over her own while they raised three kids, Peter Jr., Carol, and Michael, but she never stopped painting as Hurd’s profile rose nationally. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned him to paint a portrait, granting Hurd a half-hour sitting at Camp David. Upon viewing it, however, Johnson reportedly said, “That’s the ugliest thing I ever saw.” The painting now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

A hallway at the Roswell Museum houses a rotating exhibition of works by the two, curated by theme. On my visit, Primavera: Peter Hurd & Henriette Wyeth showcased the artists’ takes on spring, juxtaposing the drama of The Dry River with Henriette’s floral explosions in Iris (1945). “Their work is simply the foundation of our collection,” says Aaron Wilder, the museum’s curator of collections and exhibitions.

Forty minutes south, the Artesia Public Library is home to a remarkable Hurd transplant with a hell of an origin story. His enormous 1952 fresco painting, The Future Belongs to Those Who Prepare for It, spans the main reading room. The 65,000-pound, 620-square-foot, 47-feet-long mural was originally created on a wall in the former Prudential Building in Houston with the help of Henriette and other assistants. Before the structure was demolished in 2012, the Hurd fresco was offered free to whoever could remove it. Thus began its thousand-mile, yearslong odyssey to the then under-construction Artesia library, which opened in 2014 with the mural as its pièce de résistance.

A video in the reading room shows how a crew sliced the wall—with less than an inch-thick layer of fresco plaster—from the Prudential Building, shored it up with plywood, foam, plastic, and steel braces, then used a crane to lift it onto a trailer. It was stored in a Midland, Texas, airplane hangar while the library neared completion. On a sweltering day in August 2013, a crowd of Artesia locals watched the mural rise from another crane, then get ingeniously lowered through a detachable section of the new library’s roof onto a platform inside. It is known as the largest fresco ever moved in one piece.

Inside, a  hushed atmosphere surrounds the monumental portrait of life in the Southwest. It shows an idyllic ranch during harvesttime. A man empties apples from a basket under a large cottonwood as his family gathers, helping to preserve the fruits of the fall. A child and dogs play in the foreground; in the distance, a cowboy gallops a horse. Hurd put his own family in his pastoral opus: His daughter is the young woman under the tree, the boy with the pups is one of his sons. The artist is present, too, leaning against a pickup truck. From the clean geometry of the rope swing that hangs from the tree to the lone storm cloud floating in the distance, Hurd references both the moment’s ephemerality and the endurance of these agrarian rituals.

Hurd’s same rapt attention to the land and penchant for personal details is on display more than 100 miles east, in downtown Alamogordo. There, outside the former post office (now the Otero County Administration Building), Hurd was commissioned in 1940 by the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts to create three frescoes on the main entrance. To the left of the doorway, a mural depicts Hurd’s own home against the vast backdrop of the San Andres Mountains and White Sands National Park. The woman figure is based on Edna Imhoff, a teacher in Reventon; the girl is Della Joiner, daughter of the Hondo postmaster. On the right, a Hispano man based on Hondo Valley shepherd Dorothel Montoya prays for rain. “Come blessed rain, come to caress the thirsty land,” reads the inscription in Spanish beneath him.

“POP TOLD ME SOMETHING I THOUGHT WAS VERY telling,” says Michael Hurd, sitting in the airy glass atrium adjacent to the Sentinel Ranch Wine Tasting Room at the Hurd La Rinconada Gallery, in San Patricio. “As a little boy, he and his father were going out to one of the farms near the Pecos River. The artesian wells had dried up. There was so much overuse of the water that they had failed, and they were having to pump it. At that moment, Peter Hurd the conservationist was created, I think.”

“He came to the valley to help save a pristine part of the world,” Michael continues. His own boyhood was spent in a Western saddle, roaming the Hondo hills on horseback with his father as the elder Hurd lectured him about the value of the Hurd-Wyeth ranch, which expanded over decades as the couple bought up adjoining land to keep it from developers. “He communicated to me the vulnerability of the land and the water.”

In 1985, Hurd established the gallery with the goal of furthering his parents’ legacy and preserving the ranchland. Five recently renovated guest homes on the property provide lodging for visitors who come to taste specially selected New Mexico wines with custom labels that feature artworks by the Hurd-Wyeth family; to buy works by Michael, Peter, and Henriette; and to enjoy the color-washed sunsets and sun-dappled sierras that Peter immortalized in egg tempera—a unique medium that creates a pearly luminescence to glaze his vistas.

Joan Park, executive director at the Hurd Gallery, says that though Henriette largely gave up her own art ambitions, “She was the force behind Peter Hurd.” Similarly, most of Michael’s artistic tutelage came from Henriette. “His mother is the one who led him into becoming an artist, then helped shape and mold him in his own way,” Park says. “If you look at his art in between a piece of his dad’s and his mother’s, you see aspects of both of them.”

“Brevity and power is what you look for in watercolor,” says Michael, who paints familiar ranch views for several hours every day. “It’s not detail or slavishly copying. It’s interpreting the landscape in a way that’s interesting, memorable, and sparks imagination and creates nuances.”

At sunset, I watch shadows cross the river valley from the patio of the Orchard House, a white-picketed guest home overlooking a neatly planted field beside the mountains. Every instant, the vista changes, first with subtle pastel hues, and then with the dramatic rush of the bolder pinks, reds, and oranges of a true New Mexico sunset.

Michael is never bored with the inspiration the ranch provides. “You see things periodically that you never noticed before. You could take one acre and it’ll have 10 different looks throughout the year. You’re seeing it in all the different moods.”

Read more: Albuquerque’s 516 Arts recognizes five artists blazing new trails.