Sierras in Winter

Peter Hurd’s love of the Southwest comes across clearly in his brilliantly colored tempera Sierras in Winter. He had spent the previous winter in Chadds Ford, which was not to his liking. Writing to his friend, the author and fellow New Mexican Paul Horgan, that winter Hurd described the atmosphere in Chadds Ford: "All of Pennsylvania is a great grey glacier—it glimmers wanly at infrequent times when a weak sun struggles through heavy skies; a thoroughly bleak landscape." Sierras in Winter seems, in this light, to be a celebration of being back in his native surroundings. Frequently torn between Pennsylvania, where Henriette was still living, and New Mexico, Peter wrote to her in 1936, "I wish there wasn’t this terrible conflict inside me of love for this land and love for You."