Vase with Rancher Tending Cattle

This vase, designed by the American illustrator and painter Peter Hurd, was part of Steuben’s important “Twenty-seven Contemporary Artists” series produced in 1939 and exhibited for the first time in New York City in January, 1940. In 1937, Steuben's managing director John Monteith Gates met the painter Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) in Paris. Matisse expressed interest in making a design and having it engraved on Steuben glass. Acting on this idea, Gates worked for the next two years to enlist an additional 26 artists from America and Europe to create designs for Steuben glass. Each artist sent in drawings and indicated the desired shape of the vessel on which the design should be engraved. Some of the more famous artists who participated in this project included Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975), Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989), Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, b. Greece, 1888-1978), Marie Laurencin (French, 1883-1956), Aristide Maillol (French, 1861-1944), Isamu Noguchi (American, 1904-1988), Georgia O’Keefe (American, 1887-1986), and Grant Wood (American, 1892-1942). Born in Roswell, New Mexico, Hurd attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania for a year before beginning his training in 1923 with the illustrator N. C. Wyeth (American, 1882–1945) in Chadds Ford. While working with Wyeth, Hurd attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1924 to 1926. In 1929, Hurd married Wyeth's daughter, Henriette, who was also a painter. By 1931, the Hurds had made their home in San Patricio, New Mexico. By the late 1930s, Hurd was well known as an illustrator and painter of landscapes, figures, and genre scenes. Much of his subject matter was inspired by the landscape of southeast New Mexico and west Texas.