All Right-Come On-We Can Reach Haarlem in an Hour

An illustrator, muralist, lithographer, and landscape artist, Peter Hurd is often described as a regionalist painter of the American Southwest. A native of New Mexico, Hurd studied at Haverford College and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. From 1924 to 1929, he focused his attention on the study of illustration with renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth. Although he trained in oils under Wyeth, Hurd began to work with tempera, a medium which he later introduced to both N.C. and Andrew Wyeth. Hurd lived for a time in Chadds Ford after marrying Henriette Wyeth, but the two moved to New Mexico in the 1930s.

This painting is an illustration for Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, published in 1932 in an edition jointly illustrated by N.C. Wyeth and Peter Hurd. The wide horizontal format was intended to spread across two pages, as N.C. Wyeth often did in his famed endpapers for such classics as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans.