The Ranch at San Patricio

Peter Hurd (1904-1984) was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and lithographer. Born and raised in Roswell, New Mexico, he had strong ties to this area and was often described as a regionalist painter of the American Southwest. In 1921 he traveled East to attend West Point, from which he resigned (in good standing) after two years in order to pursue his true calling as an artist. He subsequently moved to the Philadelphia region and enrolled at Haverford College to study liberal arts.

In late 1923, when he was 19 years old, Hurd became acquainted with the famous illustrator, N. C. Wyeth, who he persuaded to accept him as a pupil in 1924. Hurd therefore left Haverford College after one semester and moved to Chadds Ford, PA, where he lived with the Wyeth family, attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and began studying under N. C. Wyeth, which he did for about six years. Many of Hurd’s early works were inspired by the farmland and gentle rolling hills of the Chadds Ford area. In 1929, Hurd married Wyeth’s eldest daughter, Henriette Wyeth, and in the late 1930s the two moved back to Hurd’s home state of New Mexico, where they lived on their ranch, not far from Roswell.

Hurd painted several New Mexico landscapes, including many of his ranch in San Patricio. "The Ranch at San Patricio" portrays the ranch’s original buildings when Hurd first purchased it, before he started making significant changes to them in 1935-36. In 1935, Hurd produced a lithograph of a similar view of the ranch, although by this time slight changes had been made to the house. In a letter from 1937, Hurd described building a house, cementing the walls, and whitewashing them, and by the mid-1940s, significant additions to the existing buildings were constructed.