The landscape is lush with color, a riverside camp serene with its crackling fire and abundant provisions. In the foreground before his fur-laden canoe stands a trapper, rifle in hand, worry furrowing his brow as he looks downriver. The successful hunters and their resting dogs seem ready to settle into Camp on the Upper Missouri, but the scene also hints at an unknown future—and hidden violence.

The tension in artist Todd Connor’s work is indicative of the precipitous nature of the frontier West, and the depth Connor brings to the canvas reflects a lifetime spent looking below the surface.

Connor [ToddConnorStudio.com] finished his first plein air painting at age 12 while visiting an eastern Oklahoma lake named Tenkiller, a locale that fueled the Tulsa native’s enthusiasm for exploration. “Plein air helps me see value, color and atmosphere properly and adds authenticity to my studio work,” he explains. A year later Connor’s passions took him to new depths, quite literally. “I got certified as a diver at the age of 13 with my dad. We had spent most of my childhood at the lakes and around water. I think my fascination was being below the surface.” Both encounters with nature helped shape the artist’s subsequent life and career.

In 1987, at age 23, Connor signed up for a tour with the Navy that lasted four years. “After high school I got the bug to join the service, specifically the Special Forces,” he says. “A coworker of my dad’s happened to be an ex–Vietnam UDT [Underwater Demolition Team] guy, who recommended SEALs, since I loved the water so much.” After an honorable discharge from the SEALs, Connor spent time visiting historical sites and exploring natural landscapes that renewed his interest in plein air painting.

“I’ve done hundreds of outdoor landscape paintings on-site and a few in the studio,” the artist says, “but I always wanted to tell the story of the American West. That led to learning to draw figures and horses in earnest, especially after visiting the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, Texas.”

A roster of talented artists helped him get started. “I’m grateful to have had the best of mentors in both drawing and painting,” Connor says. “My earliest was Ginzie Chancey, of Tulsa. Then, in Los Angeles, there was Steve Huston for drawing; Dan Pinkham, Dan McCaw and Donald Puttman for painting; and Gary Carter, [a member and past president of] the Cowboy Artists of America. He pointed me in the right direction for proper training by suggesting the ArtCenter College of Design, in Pasadena.”

Connor’s work often features strong female figures—mothers, daughters and sisters juxtaposed against stark vistas of rugged beauty. “Strong women evoke the primal,” he explains. “A mother protecting her nest applies to the survival of all life on the planet. In that period it was often a woman who came between the family and the threat of danger. Men weren’t always around. They were farming or out hunting for long periods of time.”

His painting The Gathering Storm, for example, depicts a young mother standing sentinel outside her sod house, infant child cradled in one hand, a double-barreled shotgun in the other. In Far From Anywhere a mother sits with her two daughters on the bench seat of their covered wagon. Shielding her eyes from the setting sun, the woman gazes over a vast open plain.

“The hardships and the teamwork it took to just stay alive is something our modern society seems to have lost touch with,” Connor says. “The family has been the foundation of humanity. I show it in the context of settling the frontier.”

In 2020 Connor moved to Fort Benton, Mont., one of the oldest settlements in the state, which served as inspiration for another of his favorite themes—the Lewis and Clark Expedition. “A fascinating story—an expedition going upriver with no motors through 2,000 miles of wilderness untouched by white men, not knowing what they would find or if they would return at all,” the artist says. “When I started painting for a living, it was coming up on the bicentennial of the expedition, and I did a series of paintings on the subject. In terms of complexity of story and number of figures and composition, it’s probably my most ambitious work to date.”

Connor had long been drawn to the history and beauty of the region. “I’d wanted to try living in old Montana since going there for 20 years to float the White Cliffs,” he says. “So many memories of being with my father and friends out there, and lots of plein air studies resulted from those trips over the years. We dressed up in 1800s costumes and created reference photos of trappers and traders, mountain men and their Indian counterparts with canoes, all against the stunning background of the cliffs and river. I’ve done many historical paintings from those shoots.”

From his 2,700-foot home studio Connor paints every day and often into the night, referencing a sketchbook loaded with ideas.

“I also do miniature paintings, which I sell from my website or at shows where I have a booth, like the [C.M.] Russell Museum auction. These small pieces give me perspective on deciding whether a larger version would be interesting.” When an idea makes the cut for further development, Connor employs models to bring the project to fruition.

Ironically, his success leaves him little time for his own works. “I am currently working on three commissions. I’m generally painting for show deadlines, the last one being the Briscoe Museum’s “Night of Artists” show. I like to be ahead with lots of ideas and options to choose from for any given exhibit, but the reality of the business is sometimes it’s pretty hard to keep up.”

Success also has its rewards. During a recent tenure as an artist in residence at Craig Barrett’s Triple Creek Ranch in Darby, Mont., Connor shared his love of painting with guests and squeezed in time for his own plein air work. 

“Painting on-site is a learning experience,” he says, “an essential activity for every painter to do now and again in their career, in order to stay fresh and growing in your craft.” 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

About one-fifth of military-age White men in the South perished during the war—a chilling statistic that reinforces the argument that steadfast devotion to the Confederate cause compelled these soldiers to continue fighting despite the relentless carnage. But before soldiers faced the clang of the battlefield, how did they decide to mobilize, and what part did Confederate law and culture play in promoting military service?

Initially, the cause of secession attracted fervent volunteers. Young men who had forged their convictions during the sectional crisis rushed with friends and neighbors to assert their martial fidelity, chanting songs about defense of home, political power, and slavery. But as 1861 drew to a close without a decisive repelling of Union forces, Confederate leaders looked ahead with uncertainty, as many thousands of volunteer enlistments were to expire by late spring. In December, the Confederate Congress enticed soldiers with a promise of furloughs and cash upon re-enlistment, but with only limited success.

Alongside formal legislative efforts to promote volunteer service, Confederate nationalists did their best to inculcate a spirit of sacrifice and duty in the public consciousness. That would include contributions on the literary front, as artists joined the push to convince the population the war was a defensive revolution and not a slaveholders’ rebellion.

At the forefront of this push was William Gilmore Simms, a novelist, editor, and planter from Charleston, S.C. Despite early opposition to the nullification movement, Simms had become increasingly sectional after 1833, even theorizing that slavery was a traditional and munificent institution. Aware the South had a reputation for lagging behind the North’s literary accomplishments, Simms sought to bolster the intellectual credibility of his section while defending its distinctions, including the sunny agricultural landscape and chivalric culture.

In late 1861, as the Confederate government debated the furlough and bounty system, Simms produced a poem in the Romantic style that exemplified the proper manner for a man of the South. The ballad’s protagonist, however, was no Lowcountry gentleman or plantation prince. Instead, Simms cast his vision of a noble soldier as a backwoods warrior, “The Mountain Partisan.”

My rifle, pouch, and knife!
My steed! And then we part!
One loving kiss, dear wife,
One press of heart to heart!
Cling to me yet awhile,
But stay the sob, the tear!
Smile—only try to smile—
And I go without a fear.

Our little cradled boy,
He sleeps—and in his sleep,
Smiles, with an angel joy,
Which tells thee not to weep, 
I’ll kneel beside, and kiss—
He will not wake the while, 
Thus dreaming of the bliss
That bids thee, too, to smile.

Think not, dear wife, I go,
With a light thought at my heart
’Tis a pang akin to woe,
That fills me as we part;
But when the wolf was heard
To howl around our lot,
Thou know’st, dear mother-bird,
I slew him on the spot!

Aye, panther, wolf, and bear,
Have perish’d ’neath my knife;
Why tremble, then, with fear,
When now I go, my wife?
Shall I not keep the peace,
That made our cottage dear;
And ’till these wolf-curs cease
Shall I be housing here?

One loving kiss, dear wife,
One press of heart to heart;
Then for the deadliest strife,
For freedom I depart!
I were of little worth,
Were these Yankee wolves left free
To ravage ’round our hearth,
And bring one grief to thee!

God’s blessing on thee, wife,
God’s blessing on the young:
Pray for me through the strife,
And teach our infant’s tongue.
Whatever haps in fight,
I shall be true to thee—
To the home of our delight—
To my people of the free!

Although we tend to associate “partisan” with political parties today, the term meant “irregular soldier” or “guerrilla” in the 19th century. Simms, who had begun building his literary bona fides with an 1835 novel The Partisan, hoped to connect Rebel soldiers with their Revolutionary War forebears, including South Carolina partisan heroes Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Henry Lee III.

His 1861 poem joined a wider Confederate effort to make secession seem congruent with the American Revolution and not destructive of the union that struggle had created. Likewise, Simms rendered his volunteer as an idealistic pioneer, an equestrian rifleman on the edge of settlement—one who had slain wild animals to “keep the peace” and was ready, too, to slay Lincoln’s “wolf-curs.” In his absence, the partisan’s wife was to remain sturdy, all while tutoring his heir, maintaining the homestead, and offering protective prayers. Simms wanted to make the compelling national narrative of wilderness conquest and republican motherhood “Confederate,” not American.

When the poem appeared in Southern Literary Messenger in March 1862, it had a new title, “The Border Ranger,” part of a push by Simms to present irregular warfare in a wider national scope—beyond merely South Carolina.

To address the Army’s tumbling manpower levels, Congress passed a conscription law in early 1862 mandating service for most White men ages 18–35, and that April issued the Partisan Ranger Act, pulling independent guerrillas into the Confederate command structure in an effort to maximize the benefits of “partisan” warfare while tempering any of its infamous excesses through supervision by the formal military.

Yet what seemed rational for Simms’ archetypical “Border Ranger” would be harrowing for thousands of men and women on this new borderland of whirling violence. Indeed, the poem’s new title reads not only as an invocation of the frontier spirit, but as a plea for faithfulness from those on the Confederacy’s geographical margins. Partisan warfare on the border produced provocative heroes for the South (William Quantrill, John Singleton Mosby, etc.), but it also blurred into bushwhacking and spurred Union sympathizers to take up arms themselves. Southern Unionists, such as the bridge-burning Tennessee mountain men under David Fry, inflicted their share of partisan terror to preserve the United States.

The effort to inculcate a national feeling for the South by Simms, who died in 1870, did not alter the war’s outcome, but the literary story had just begun. As former Confederates endeavored to explain their subjugation, new myths of untainted chivalry in the coming decades would help to solidify the memory of an honorable cause and an honorable defeat.

Literary works present a challenge for those who love history. Parsing an author’s intentions, the context of the time, the allusions and hidden references, and the representation of the truth can seem daunting. But such literary endeavors also offer an opportunity to scrutinize how contemporaries painted their beliefs and assumptions. 

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

In the first years of the 20th century, despite the humiliating constraints of social segregation, thousands of African Americans made a living in show business. In Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Manhattan’s Harlem, there were top-tier vaudeville houses that headlined Black acts for Black audiences, and the Theaters Owners Booking Association signed up Black acts for almost 100 smaller venues around the country that catered to Black audiences. There were night spots like the Cotton Club in Harlem that for White audiences mounted lavish all-Black musical revues and Harlem theaters for full-scale Black musicals.

But the pinnacle was Broadway. As early as 1900, there were all-Black musicals there, but the concept really took off after the Eubie Blake–Nobel Sissle musical Shuffle Along opened in 1921 and ran an astonishing 504 performances. Producers sensed that the high stepping and raucous humor associated with Black performers were a money maker, and over the next decade 22 more all-Black shows opened on Broadway. These shows slotted the Black performers into stereotypical roles of shuffling gait and slurred speech, but they also opened the door for dozens of performers to have lifelong careers that eventually allowed them more dignity.

The money woes of the Great Depression of the 1930s made it tough to find backers for any Broadway shows, and the Shuffle Along type minstrelsy all-Black show virtually disappeared. But by then, two important corners had been turned: top-billed performers such as Paul Robson and Ethel Waters had moved out of the racial show business ghetto to earn star billing in otherwise White shows, and the classic American operas Porgy and Bess and Four Saints in Three Acts had opened on Broadway, giving African Americans roles as complex three-dimensional human beings.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

Director John Ford went on inactive status from the navy in 1944 to film an adaptation of They Were Expendable, William Lindsay White’s book about PT boats during the opening months of the war in the Philippines. The movie starred Robert Montgomery, who had joined the navy after Pearl Harbor and, like the character he plays, commanded a PT boat. John Wayne, who had not served in the war, was billed second. Back on a film set, Ford remained the same cantankerous needler he had been before the war and he zeroed in on “Duke” Wayne, one of his favorite targets. In Print the Legend, his Ford biography, author Scott Eyman relates how Montgomery watched the director rake Wayne over the coals. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford asked in front of the cast and crew. Eyman related what happened next. “Finally, Robert Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director’s chair and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.’ The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears.”

Despite the turmoil on set, They Were Expendable ended up being one of Ford’s finest films, a melancholic love letter to PT boats and to the navy in general. 

When the film opens in Manila on the eve of war in 1941, Lieutenant John “Brick” Brickley (Montgomery) wants to demonstrate the potential of the PT boats he commands. His admiral is dismissive (“In wartime, I prefer something more substantial,” he says). So is his second in command, Lt. (j.g.) Rusty Ryan (Wayne). Rusty wants a transfer to destroyers. 

Then the war comes. 

In one early scene, Rusty receives a finger wound that becomes infected and Brick orders him to the hospital on Corregidor. There he strikes up a brief romance with nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed). Like everything else in the movie, the romance is realistic and understated. Rusty invites Sandy for dinner at the hut serving as the officers’ club, where sailors hidden in the crawl space beneath the building serenade them. It’s a touching scene, but Ford understands that romance is impossible under these conditions. The last time the two speak is over a field telephone as Rusty prepares to depart on a mission and Sandy remains on Corregidor as the Japanese move closer. The conversation gets cut off abruptly when higher-ups commandeer the line. Rusty—and the audience—never learn Sandy’s fate. 

Ford uses his own naval experience to create a sense of authenticity. There’s no place for cinematic heroics. Earlier in the film, as Brick chafes at the limited role his boats have been given, the admiral compares the situation to a baseball game. If the manager tells you to hit a sacrifice bunt, that’s what you do. “You and I are professionals,” he says. At the end, when Rusty decides to give up his seat on the last plane out to Australia so he can join the guerrilla fight against the Japanese, Brick calmly reminds him that they have their orders. Rusty sits back down. 

Brick’s PT boats do see combat and those who like watching these speedy plywood craft in action will enjoy those sequences. They also get one vital mission when they spirit “the General” out of the war zone so he can continue the fight from Australia. Although the General remains nameless, audiences certainly recognized him as Douglas MacArthur. In real life, John D. Bulkeley, the Medal of Honor recipient on whom Montgomery’s character is based, did transport MacArthur and his family south to safety on Mindanao, where B-17s then flew them to Australia. 

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its eye for detail—when Brickley grabs a pair of scissors to estimate the distance on map; the terrified faces of wounded soldiers on Corregidor as Japanese bombs fall; the cook’s instructions to use a pinch of salt in the pancake batter; the way Sandy brushes her hair and puts on a string of pearls before sitting down to dinner with the officers; the fact that Rusty demands aviation fuel (PT boats used Packard engines adapted from airplanes). It is also beautifully filmed, with haunting shots of the shadowy and wet tunnels of Corregidor and some pulse-pounding sequences of PT boats dodging shell bursts. 

They Were Expendable turned out to be one of John Ford’s best films, but it was not a huge box office success when it was released at the end of 1945. It is a war movie in a minor key—subdued and somewhat melancholy. It matches the film’s subject matter: the American experience in the Philippines at the start of the war did not go well, either. No doubt, audiences who had just seen the terrible war come to an end were not eager to relive its grim early days, no matter how beautifully photographed.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

Thirty-two-year-old Cyrus Walker isn’t your typical Western artist. For one thing, he draws his inspiration from the classic comic books of the 1940s and ’50s. For another, he was born and raised in small-town Vermont—“Nothing but dairy cows and green mountains,” he recalls. And though he majored in graphic design and marketing at Montana State University, for a while he seriously considered pursuing life as a “ski bum.”

But for the past six years Walker [cyruswalkerart.com] has been tinkering with a fresh take on old subjects—namely, vibrant acrylic/oils inspired by the mythical West. Call it a 21st century reimagining of a Beadle and Adams half-dime novel or a 1950s Dell comic book. The artist himself describes his work as “a split between the reality of Western culture and the more fictional narrative quality of the Western genre. I find that paradox to be incredibly interesting to focus on and wrap your mind around.”

Comic books and films may have been Walker’s introduction to the West, but the West wasn’t what drew Walker to Montana. He was attending a liberal arts school in rural Maine but wanted something more traditional—“that experience of walking around a real campus,” he says. “I wanted more of an urban experience. I find it interesting that I moved to Bozeman, Mont., for an urban experience.” The city had a population of slightly more than 37,000 when he arrived in 2010, but Walker had never lived in a town that big. “It seemed huge,” he says. “Walking around campus, and all the big brick buildings, and all the people—I was overwhelmed. That was exactly what I was looking for.”

He took breaks from college to work so he could pay his tuition. One ultimately transformative job placed him in a Bozeman antique store, which required him to seek objects at estate sales, old ranches and the like. That turned him on to collecting old books, the illustrations in which grabbed his imagination.

“My studio,” he says, “is pretty much set up like that antique store.”

He also met his wife, Whitney, in Bozeman.

After graduation Walker first worked as a graphic designer, then turned to creating rodeo posters on the urging of Bob Coronato, a Wyoming-based Western artist known for such work. “Go for it, kid,” Bob told Cyrus. “Just make them your own.”

Walker’s first poster was for the World Famous Miles City (Montana) Bucking Horse Sale. “That was my first touch of really fine art,” he says, “sort of a bridge between fine art and design. But it also allowed me to take a really good look at the Western genre.” He was particularly struck at how tourists from back East would buy brand-new boots and cowboy hats just to wear to a rodeo.

“When someone says, ‘Western movie,’ or, ‘Western theme,’ your brain automatically goes to the more Hollywood aspect of the genre,” Walker says. “But that’s not entirely true of the culture itself. My brother-in-law has a ranch outside of Miles City, and I see how they live, and it’s nothing even close to what you see in the movies. They’re just normal folks.”

Regardless, that “idea of the West” began to percolate, and Walker started painting his signature mythical images, trying to capture “that break point, right before or right after something happened—something that you’d see in a movie or in real life. Right before the rider falls off. Right before the calf gets his nuts nipped. That kind of scene.”

The Walkers moved to Helena in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, “when studio space was impossible to find, and everyone was working at home.” Knowing how messy he could be while painting, Cyrus “unfinished” their basement. “I took all the carpet out, removed everything that I could.”

Walker typically works on a weekly schedule. On Mondays he’ll work on sketches and cut lumber to stretch canvas. Tuesdays he’ll start painting, taking breaks from the easel to build more canvases and start more sketches. He’s usually able to finish one 56-by-35-inch painting (his go-to size) a week, “sometimes more, if I feel like losing sleep.”

When not painting or prepping, Walker is often out hiking, camping and photographing landscapes for research. He also remains a hunter-gatherer of the genre. “I’m always collecting old books and comic books and stashing them away,” he admits. 

Western art and history still fascinate him.

“Partly why I found it so interesting to focus on it is that it’s location-based and vision-based,” he says. “There’s no time period for Western art—not like the Baroque, Renaissance, Victorian periods—even though it dates back to the 1800s or even earlier when European artists were coming over to the United States.”

Walker is also fascinated by the public works art projects of the Works Progress Administration, which between 1935 and ’43 hired hundreds of artists to create thousands of paintings, murals and sculptures in such municipal buildings as post offices, courthouses, schools, hospitals and train depots. “They were meant to inspire and bolster and empower the people of the United States, who were going through some really rough times,” Walker says. “That was probably where the genre officially split from reality because…the government paid artists to make up scenes especially compelling and fictional in narrative.” Instead of painting what they had lived or witnessed, as Charles M. Russell did during his early years, these artists, notes Walker, were “remembering something or were taken by some fantastic scene they had in their minds.”

His deep dive into Western mythology keeps Walker busy. “I think I’ve finally gotten to the point in my life where painting is all I truly want to be doing and what I get the most satisfaction by doing,” he says, “drawing attention to that strange sort of phenomena that happens when people think of Western things.” 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

A large group of forgotten combatants stare out at us every day from the annals of war history. They are visible to us in everything from ancient stone reliefs to elegant oil paintings to scratched early black-and-white photos; they regularly appear in statuary alongside famous war leaders, and they have taken part in too many historical battles to name. They are horses, and many avid military history enthusiasts usually don’t give much pause to think about them. This is because horses are animals and, as such, are often taken for granted.

Considered within conflict history, horses have often been viewed as little more than vehicles or baggage conveyors for warriors of the past. Yet horses were warriors in their own right.

In addition to bearing the stresses of combat, horses have also borne another burden alongside soldiers of yore—armor.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, horses were essential for battle as well as tournament sports like jousting. A complete set of horse armor could weigh between 40 to 90 pounds—and that’s not even counting the added weight of the rider.

Most horses selected for battle or tournament challenges were robust breeds—the four-legged equivalent of tanks. Breeds capable of charging into combat wearing armor were known as destriers, coursers and rounceys. As with humans, armor for a horse was not always intended for merely protective functions, but could also be ceremonial and an indicator of its owner’s status in society.

While body armor for horses varied according to the riders’ culture, traditions and available materials, a universal and common element of horse armor across the globe tended to be the chanfron (also called shaffron or chamfron), head and facial armor which might fairly be called a “horse helmet.” The following is a roundup of some unusual examples of chanfrons and other elements of horse armor from around the world.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

See more stories

subscribe now!

 

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln casually and unknowingly created a time capsule of his contemporary mindset on both slavery and race relations—not hidden in a cornerstone but taking the form of a 3.25- by 5.78-inch black campaign notebook shared with Capt. James N. Brown, a longtime friend and fellow campaigner.

It was the waning days of Lincoln’s senatorial campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and Brown was running for Illinois state legislature, partly at Lincoln’s encouragement. Brown, however, was assailed for his ties to Lincoln. Virulent opponents said that Lincoln—and therefore Brown, by association—supported and wanted to bring about social and political Negro equality.

Brown beseeched Lincoln for a clear statement on that Negro equality, what Brown referred to as the “paramount issue” of the day. Lincoln acceded, annotating what he called a “scrapbook” with news clips of his speeches on the subject, and a definitive 8-page letter, transcribed here.

Brown used the notebook from Lincoln during his campaign’s waning days. It didn’t help. He lost the election.

The scrapbook was cherished by Brown and, after his 1868 death, by his sons William and Benjamin. Eventually they sold it to New York rare-book dealer George D. Smith, who found a customer in Philadelphia Lincoln collector William H. Lambert, who believed Lincoln’s words warranted wider distribution and published a version of the notebook in 1901 as Abraham Lincoln: His Book: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original with an Explanatory Note by J. McCan Davis.

After Lambert’s death the ‘scrapbook’ was auctioned in 1914; and purchased for Henry E. Huntington’s San Marino, California library.

In his career Ross E. Heller, holder of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, has been a journalist, U.S. Senatorial press secretary, lobbyist, association executive, entrepreneur, newspaper publisher and now, editor/author. Researching this book, he is also discoverer of new facts of America’s most-storied life; a life about which no one could imagine anything new could ever be found.

This article is an excerpt from By Abraham Lincoln: His 1858 Time Capsule, edited by Ross E. Heller and published by CustomNEWS, Seaside Books.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

Whatever subject or scene Rick Kennington paints—American Indians in the saddle or in camp, contemporary or Old West cowboys at work—his blend of techniques lends his works a life of their own. But that wasn’t always the case.

“I used to paint thin with many layers,” recalls the artist [rickkennington.com] from his home studio in North Salt Lake, Utah. 

His mentors told him to use more paint—and when one’s mentors include such masters in their own right as Grant Redden, Jason Rich, Chad Poppleton and Charles Dayton, one listens.

“I was instructed to purchase the larger tubes of paint to encourage me to have heavier loads of paint on my pallet and to have the stiffer bristle brushes to help gather heavy loads,” Kennington explains. “Over time I became fascinated with paintings that have a high paint quality—meaning, the paint and texture have aesthetic appeal. 

“It’s amazing at times to remember how different my mindset was 20 years ago,” he says. “I thought I had a good handle on painting. However, the more I learn and study, the more I realize I have much further to go. I enjoy seeing how my work has evolved and progressed over the years.”

That progression began in boyhood when he watched his older sister draw and sketch and tried to match her skills. His parents fostered their son’s budding interest with gifts of drawing pads, pencils and instructional art books. Family trips to Jackson, Wyo., stirred Kennington’s love of Western subjects.

“I remember walking into the Legacy Gallery, which is no longer there, and being blown away by all the paintings from the best contemporary artists…artists such as Bill Anton, Clyde Aspevig, Tom Browning and Jason Rich,” he recalls. “I wondered how amazing it would be to have my artwork hanging on the walls in a gallery like that.” 

Thus inspired, Kennington worked hard and earned an art scholarship to Salt Lake Community College. He later transferred to the University of Utah, where he attended workshops, learned from established artists and gradually shed bad habits.

“I remember asking one of my mentors, ‘How do I get my work in a gallery?’” he recalls. “After a thoughtful pause came the sincere reply, ‘Become so good at painting that they can’t ignore you.’ I took that to heart and continued to improve my skills.”

His focus on the West came naturally.

“I come from deep-rooted Western pioneer stock,” he says. “In the late 1800s my great-great-grandfather William Henry Kennington settled Star Valley, Wyo., where he raised his family. This is where my lineage comes from.”

The artist spends most of his time in the studio, though he paints plein air a few times a year. “Painting outdoors is more of a break for me,” he says.

But Kennington doesn’t feel constrained working indoors.

“As an artist, I don’t feel I have a stringent routine other than trying to get in as much painting as I can,” he says. “I do have to say, one of my routines is to constantly clean up. I am not a neat and tidy artist. I don’t know how, but I tend to get paint all over the place. I constantly go through new clothing, and I am always cleaning up paint left by me all throughout the house.…My wife is amazing.”

As models he often uses friends on horseback, but he’s also taken photographs on professional artist rides in South Dakota. Kennington uses such photos as a reference point. “Much of my painting—such as value, color and compositions—are created outside of the photo,” he explains. “Much of this comes from years spent painting outdoors, studying other great artwork and a whole lot of practice.

“There’s a lot that goes into creating a painting. I enjoy putting in the practice and research of creating art. I spend a lot of time on thumbnail sketches, working out designs and layouts of ideas floating around in my head. I’ll use photo references to help with sketches. But I mostly try to make sure the design and problems with the photos can be worked out as I practice with the sketches. It can take multiple sketches and hours of study before I develop a design I can live with. I then use this knowledge to place paint on the canvas.”    

Kennington is certainly keeping busy, enjoying his career as well as his family. Though his sons are gifted artists, they are interested in other things. “I’m glad each is his own person,” the artist says. “My family puts up with me well. I am so grateful for their support.”

Kennington aspires to create historically accurate paintings of the five American Indian nations of Utah. “There is a lot of history and story that needs to be told,” he says. “I’ve always loved learning about native American history, specifically about the Utah nations. I am fascinated with their culture. They are beautiful people, and I hope my artwork represents them in the best light.”

Meanwhile, he’s still learning the craft.

“If I continually learn and practice, I will continue to elevate my work,” he says. “The struggle of becoming a better artist is part of the satisfaction art brings. I don’t know if I will ever ‘make it’ as an artist, because I feel I am a continual student, striving for the next level.

“I enjoy paintings that look like paintings,” the artist says of his more recent work. “I aim for accuracy in drawing, value and color. But I enjoy using thick paint and challenging myself with a looser, or Impressionist, approach. I try to give the viewer an emotion driven from other aspects that can’t be provided by a photo.”Kennington’s commitment to the West remains as firm as his commitment to his craft. “Growing up in the West and being outdoors is a major part of my life,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed growing up around horses, ranches and the Western landscape. Much of the Western ranches and landscapes have been lost with new development, especially in Utah. I feel art is a way to help preserve and maintain the history and culture of the West.” 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

There has been no shortage of literature about the North Vietnamese Army’s final advance on Saigon and the many and varied means by which the last withdrawing Americans got various South Vietnamese out of town before the Presidential Palace sprouted the gold star on a red and blue field of the Viet Cong (soon to be permanently replaced by the gold star on red of a united Socialist Republic of Vietnam). Each is about as personal as every participant’s story. Ralph White’s memoir Getting Out of Saigon is no exception—which is to say that it’s its own sort of exceptional.

White was an employee at Chase Manhattan Bank’s Bangkok branch when higher-ups gave him a special assignment in April 1975: Keep Chase’s Saigon branch open as long as possible and, if (well, when really) the communists prevailed, get out with all the senior staff he could. White had been in Vietnam before, in 1971, but his principal assets for this assignment were that he was young (27), competent, single, and most of all expendable. Fortunately for him, he also seems to have been open minded, resourceful and, when it came to sorting out the right people to assist him from among what he called “delusionals,” “pilgrims,” and “realists,” he was a quick study.

While the American ambassador to South Vietnam and chief “delusional” Graham Martin clung to the illusion that Saigon could never fall to the communists—who were a few days’ march away—White got a different perspective from the brother of a teenaged prostitute who greatly appreciated his efforts to get her out of the country and into a better life. Her brother happened to be a Viet Cong and he gave White all the help he could as well as a summation of the “bloodbath” to come: “Not happening. They just want us to leave. They want their country back. As far as they’re concerned their choices have narrowed to capitalist occupation or communist independence. This day has been inevitable since President Truman turned down Uncle Ho’s pleas for help against the French.”

Even with that cold comfort, White faced obstacles aplenty on his own side when he took it upon himself to get all the Vietnamese Chase employees out of the country—a challenge that came down to knowing the right “realists” and finding the right vehicles for passage by water or air (both, as it turned out). In the course of an intriguing tale worthy of Graham Greene—which White fully realized he was now living—the author learned as he went and got by with a little help from his friends. While admitting that he took some artistic license with the dialogue, White adds that, “The events related herein are entirely true.” What emerges from his memory is a bona fide page-turner. —Jon Guttman

Getting Out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians

by Ralph White.Simon & Schuster, 2023, $28.99

get it on amazon

If you buy something through our site, we might earn a commission.

This book review appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Vietnam magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

The earliest depictions of war served one purpose: to emphasize the invincible might of the leaders who commissioned them. A stroke of accuracy might be useful toward establishing credibility, but only so long as it served the warlord’s purposes. Pharaoh Ramses II, for example, employed what amounted to a private propaganda bureau to back up his claims to godhood. Witness Egyptian depictions of his 1274 bc victory at Kadesh. His Hittite opponents commemorated it as their victory, though in reality it ended in an inconclusive standoff. Over the subsequent millennia war artists have wrestled with the matter of balancing accuracy and the lionization of their subject, who was very often the supporting patron.

However effective a depiction of battle may be in its own time, posterity often brings out the nitpickers. Often even the most well-meaning attempts at accuracy miss something. Just as often errors, accidental or deliberate, can be glaring. In any case, the advocates of historicity have their own leg to stand on in their conviction that a true act of valor can and should stand on its own merits.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now!

 

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

William Sidney Mount, one of America’s finest 19th-century genre, or scene, painters, created glorious portraits of Black and multiracial people, among others. In politics, he was a Jacksonian Democrat, who favored states’ rights to choose slavery as America’s borders expanded westward. Later on, he would vote against Lincoln. And yet, unlike most White artists of the mid-1800s, who portrayed Black people in demeaning caricatures, Mount painted his subjects with humanity, realism, and psychological depth. Before the Civil War, photography wasn’t common and Black individuals were rarely portrayed in fine art. Mount’s paintings are extremely valuable to the historical record both because of their rarity and their quality. Out of several hundred paintings Mount made in his lifetime, his dozen works that feature Black and multiracial individuals are among his best.

Mount lived his whole life on the rural North Shore of Long Island, N.Y., aside from several years in Manhattan. He never married. From the local farming homesteads, held by his siblings, extended family, and their neighbors, he chose his models, both Black and White. He was also a fiddler, and he liked to illustrate country folk, both Black and White, making music. Due to New York’s partial manumission acts beginning in 1799 and the state’s abolition of slavery in 1827, all Mount’s Black models were free.

Wealthy, White, urban, East Coast businessmen, such as Henry Breevort Jr., Edward L. Carey, Gouverneur Kemble, and Luman Reed purchased Mount’s rural scenes of the 1830s and 1840s. “Yankee” themed artwork became popular in America during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, from 1829 to 1837, which Jackson billed as the “era of the common man.” Mount’s farming scenes won him accolades at the National Academy of Design exhibitions in Manhattan. Racial diversity added to the marketability of such paintings, but with one caveat—that Black and White individuals be segregated within the illustration. As art historian Elizabeth Johns points out, White American buyers were not interested in artwork that challenged the existing segregated and hierarchical social order.

In the 1850s, Mount created three large portraits of Black and multiracial musicians for an entirely different clientele: European buyers of lithographic prints. Mount’s New York agent for the Paris-based international art dealership, Goupil, Vibert & Co. (later Goupil and Co.), commissioned paintings that put Black people front and center in the composition. Europeans were apparently more open-minded about portraying Black people than were their American counterparts.

This portfolio is adapted from The Art of William Sidney Mount: Long Island People of Color on Canvas, The History Press, 2022, $23.99

this article first appeared in American history magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

A sculpture titled The Council of War occupies a prominent place in my library. Created in 1868 by the artist John Rogers, it depicts a seated Abraham Lincoln holding a large map and flanked by Lt. Gen. U.S. Grant and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Grant points toward the map with his right index finger while Stanton, cleaning his glasses, looks on. The idea for the grouping came from Stanton, who described a meeting in March 1864 when Grant, “after returning from his first visit to the Army of the Potomac, laid before the President the plan of operations he proposed to adopt.” Robert Todd Lincoln pronounced Rogers’ effort the most lifelike sculpted image of his father, and Stanton expressed similar admiration. Whenever I look at The Council of War, I imagine eavesdropping on three leaders who helped steer the United States toward victory during the war’s final tumultuous year.

The Massachusetts-born Rogers (1829-1904) created scores of small-scale plaster sculptures for sale at modest cost to a middle-class audience. Between 1859 and the early 1890s, he sold an estimated 80,000 pieces. More than a dozen Civil War–related works reflected the artist’s staunchly pro-Union and pro-emancipation views. Although The Council of War features famous individuals, most of the works focus on common soldiers, civilians, and African Americans—usually in settings that resonated with the loyal citizenry at a fundamental level. A Boston newspaper characterized the wartime pieces as “packed with far reaching and penetrating suggestions of wide spread trials and joys.”

Two works from 1863 deal with correspondence between soldiers and their families and friends at home. Rogers explained the scene in Country Post Office: News From the Army: “An old shoemaker, who is postmaster also, has just opened the mailbag from the army. He is taking a provokingly long time to study out the address of a letter which a young lady by his side recognizes at once as for her.” One reviewer suggested the woman, eager to get her letter, could have been a wife, sister, or lover—which meant a wide range of viewers might see in Country Post Office their own personal experience. Mail Day reversed the perspective, offering a soldier with a writing table in his lap and a pensive look on his face. “It is the day for the mail to close,” wrote Rogers, “and a soldier is puzzling his brains so as to complete his letter in time.”

Rogers addressed disparate themes in a pair of works whose titles highlighted the war’s human damage. Wounded Scout: A Friend in the Swamp (1864) reflected his interest in Union combatants and emancipation. The dominant figure is a tall escaped slave who steadies a White soldier with an injured right arm. A political message resides in a copperhead snake that, Rogers observed, raises “its head to strike the negro while he is doing his friendly act.” The artist sent a copy to Abraham Lincoln, who thanked him for the “very pretty and suggestive, and, I should think, excellent…piece of art.” Abolitionist Lydia Maria Child thought the sculpture offered “a significant lesson of human brotherhood for all the coming ages.” Among Rogers’ most popular pieces, Wounded to the Rear, One More Shot (1864) portrays two soldiers, one struck in the arm and the other in the leg. Ordered to leave the firing line, they have stopped to fire a last round at the Rebels. This tribute to Union courage proved a favorite with veterans. For Joseph R. Hawley, a division commander during the war and long-time senator from Connecticut, “Nothing relating to the war in painting or sculpture surpasses ‘One More Shot.’”

Several of the sculptures echo Winslow Homer’s treatments of daily life among Union soldiers. The Camp Fire: Making Friends With the Cook (1862) presents a seated soldier reading from a newspaper to an African American standing over a kettle. The two men’s body language suggests a comfortable familiarity across racial lines. The Town Pump (1862) places an infantryman holding a cup and a woman with a bucket beside a common well, evoking the plight of thirsty soldiers on the march, while Camp Life of the Card Players (1862) shows two bare-headed Zouaves who have re-purposed a large drum as their playing surface.

Most of Rogers’ audience would have interpreted the Black figures in Wounded Scout and The Camp Fire as contrabands—Civil War parlance for African American refugees. Union Refugees (1863) deals with displaced White Unionists in the Confederacy. The three-person grouping, comprising an obviously exhausted couple and their small boy, received considerable praise when exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1863.

Rogers devoted his last Civil War–related piece, titled The Fugitive’s Story, to emancipation. It served as an artistic bookend to The Slave Auction (1859), a commercial failure that nonetheless had garnered some national attention for Rogers. As in The Council of War, he chose three major historical figures for The Fugitive’s Story—in this case abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Ward Beecher. Grouped around a desk, the three listen to an African American woman, who holds her child and tells about escaping enslavement. The Independent, a New York weekly Beecher had edited early in the Civil War, reported that Sojourner Truth wept upon seeing Rogers’ treatment of an enslaved mother who had shepherded her child to freedom.

Truth’s response suggests the emotional appeal of Rogers’ sculptures. A photograph of George Armstrong and Elizabeth Bacon Custer at Fort Abraham Lincoln in the early 1870s includes Wounded to the Rear on one end of a small table and Mail Call on the other. Mrs. Custer’s Boots and Saddles (1885) mentioned “two of the Rogers statuettes that we had carried about with us for years….our attachment for those little figures, and the associations connected with them, made us study out a way always to carry them.” Close examination of Rogers’ Civil War sculptures helps illuminate why so many Americans joined Sojourner Truth and the Custers in linking the artist’s work to important elements of the conflict.

this article first appeared in civil war times magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States’ subsequent entry into World War II affected every corner of American life. That included the Walt Disney Studios. On the day of the attack, army troops arrived at the Disney lot in Burbank, California, to set up an anti-aircraft battery.

Walt Disney and his staff pledged their support to the war effort, with the studio devoting over 90 percent of its wartime output to producing training, propaganda, entertainment, and public-service films, starting with a short for Lockheed titled Four Methods of Flush Riveting. Disney also produced publicity and print campaigns—almost all without profit. Even the animated members of Disney’s entourage supported the war effort, appearing in advertisements, stamp books, magazines, and government posters to promote war bond sales, food recycling, and more. (When government officials objected to Donald Duck appearing in a short for the Internal Revenue Bureau about the importance of paying taxes, Walt pointed out that getting the duck was equivalent to MGM loaning out Clark Gable.)

In March 2023 the National WWII Museum opened a special traveling exhibit, The Walt Disney Studios and World War II, which explores how the beloved entertainment company supported the war. Organized by the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, California, the exhibit features more than 500 rare historical artifacts and film clips and includes profiles of Disney employees who left the studio to join the armed forces.

Located in the heart of New Orleans, the National WWII Museum tells the story of the American experience in the war that changed the world—why it was fought, how it was won, and what it means today—so that future generations will know the price of freedom and be inspired by what they learn. The Walt Disney Studios and World War II will be at the museum through September 24, 2023. 

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

The National Portrait Gallery in February unveiled a rare portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. The nine-foot-tall portrait, painted by W.F.K. Travers in 1865, is one of only three known full-length renderings of the 16th president and will be on loan to the Smithsonian gallery in Washington, D.C., for the next five years.

The painting, which hung for decades in a municipal building in a small New Jersey town, has been restored and is now part of the “America’s Presidents” gallery.

Lincoln sat for Travers in 1864 and Travers completed the oil painting in Germany shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Travers then sold the painting to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt. In 1876, the painting was displayed at an exposition in Philadelphia, where Mary Todd Lincoln was reportedly, “so overcome by its lifelike appearance that she fainted and was carried out of the hall.”

For years, it hung in the U.S. Capitol while Congress considered whether to purchase it, but it was ultimately sold to the Rockefeller family. In the 1930s, Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge—daughter of William Jr. and niece of John D.—built the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building in memory of her deceased son and filled it with art, including the Lincoln portrait.

In 2017, an archivist discovered that a marble bust of Napoleon sitting in the corner of the council room of the Hartley Dodge Memorial Building had been sculpted by Auguste Rodin, prompting the foundation to reassess all of the art in its collection. The loan of the Lincoln portrait to the National Portrait Gallery is part of that reassessment.

In addition to Lincoln’s likeness, the painting is filled with symbols noting the president’s place in history. He stands in front of a bust of George Washington and a rendering of the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze. Lincoln’s hand rests on a bound copy of the Constitution, next to a scroll bearing a draft of the 13th Amendment. Behind the scroll is a small statue of an African American man rising as he pulls the chains from his body.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of American History magazine.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100-some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life. —Michael Dolan

this article first appeared in American history magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

Learn more

This portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

A handful of mischievous cowboys are enjoying a night on the town, setting off firecrackers beneath a packer’s horses outside a saloon, in Gary Lynn Roberts’s 36-by-50-inch oil on canvas Charlie and the Pranksters. Roberts describes the scene as “a night out, too much to drink and perhaps even a local rivalry—a group of young cowboys bringing a lot of excitement to town.”

If the work appears to echo Russell’s iconic 1909 oil on canvas In Without Knocking—which depicts a group of boisterous, gun-toting cowboys literally riding into a saloon—well, that was the artist’s intention. The buildings are modeled after those in Russell’s painting, and the saloon in Roberts’ work is also named the Hoffman Bar.

“Charlie and the Pranksters depicts a scene as might have been told by Charlie himself,” says the artist, “being right in the middle of all the commotion.” Roberts rendered the painting for the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, which sold the original in 2018 to an anonymous New York collector for $30,000. 

A native of Texas, Roberts [GaryLynnRoberts.com] lives and paints in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana, where he moved in 2008 with wife Nancy and daughters Mary and Anna. It’s perhaps no surprise he chose to pay tribute to Russell, though his career path began long before his move north.

“For as long as I can remember, all I ever wanted to do was be a painter,” Roberts says.

Throughout his childhood he was steeped in art. His father, Joe Rader Roberts (1925–82), studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, became a noted Western artist and was designated Texas State Artist in 1974–75. His mother, Nelda, was also a painter. Several of their portraits of Rangers hang in the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum in Waco.

“My dad was a great influence,” Roberts says. “We shared a strong passion for art. At a young age he instilled in me a strong work ethic. My father took art seriously and believed in learning the fundamentals first. For years he pounded that into me.

“At the age of 14 I got my start in the art business by painting signs and lettering windows and trucks. My mother would drive me around town with my paint box to grocery and furniture stores, where I would paint the windows with weekly specials or holiday scenes.”

Roberts also won his first art award at age 14, at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. But he wasn’t painting full time in those days. “Growing up in Texas, my life revolved around horses,” he says. While training horses and performing in rodeos, he was able to observe them firsthand, which later helped him depict their personalities.

Other talented artists also mentored Roberts. He received one-on-one training from G. Harvey (born Gerald Harvey Jones, 1933–2017), the American traditionalist whose works were collected by such notables as Lyndon B. Johnson and Margaret Thatcher, as well as A.D. Greer (1904–98), the Oklahoma Territory–born artist known for his Texas landscapes.

“I have taken that knowledge and experience and molded it into my own style, a mixture of Realism and Impressionism,” Roberts says.

The awards keep coming: the C.M. Russell Art Auction People’s Choice Award and the Honorary Chairman Award for Roberts’ After the Shower in 2009, the 2012 Best of Show at the John Clymer Museum Auction for his Colors of Fall and many others.

And Roberts keeps learning. “That’s what keeps my paintings relevant,” he says.

“My love for horses, rodeo and the beautiful Montana landscape draws me to the American West. I grew up in an era with Western movie stars like Roy Rogers and John Wayne. My work encompasses a time when cattle drives, Indian encampments and cowboys on horseback were prevalent. My imagination can run wild in the American West.”

The artist follows no set routine when it comes to painting, and each work is different. “I follow my heart,” he says. “I paint what I am passionate about.”

When does he know a painting is ready?

“No one sees imperfections like an artist,” Roberts says. “There is always something that can be changed. Knowing when a painting is ready can be difficult, because changing these imperfections can lead to overworking the painting.”

Roberts credits his Christian faith for his success. “My biggest blessing from God is my imagination,” he says.

The artist recently partnered with Treasure State Frames to create giclées for people who can’t afford his original artwork. Jordan Summers creates the frames, and Summers’s wife, Ashley, prints the giclées.

“Giclées are a fine art reproduction, using premium archival inks and high-quality canvas, ensuring the prints will last over 100 years,” Roberts says. “I enhance every giclée, meaning I paint in areas to add texture making them look more like an original.”

Though he enjoyed his playful take on Russell’s work, Roberts claims no favorite artist, past or present, but appreciates a broad range of creative works. What’s his take on the future of Western art?

“I am optimistic,” he says. “It represents the history and heritage of America.”

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

In January, Mecum Auctions put rocker Elvis Presley’s 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar on the block. The winning bid was $260,000, but when the bidder backed out, businessman/entrepreneur James “Jimmy” Webb stepped in and made the purchase for $234,000. Webb, who operates the YouTube channel Jimmy’s World, had the airplane disassembled and trucked to Florida, where he has plans for the jet’s next incarnation.

“The short version is I’m going to convert the fuselage into an RV so it can travel around the country for the rest of the world to enjoy,” he says. Webb’s analysis indicated it could cost nearly $6 million to get the JetStar airworthy again. 

The King of Rock and Roll had purchased the four-engine craft in December 1976 for $840,000 and sold it shortly before this death on August 16, 1977. Its last owner was a Saudi Arabian company. The plane had suffered from weathering during the nearly four decades it spent parked outside at the Roswell International Air Center in Roswell, New Mexico, and its engines and some of its cockpit instrumentation had been removed. It still boasted some unique features, including a red velvet interior and a working cassette deck and VCR player. Also included in the sale was a copy of the airplane’s aircraft security agreement, signed by Presley and his father, Vernon.

The swept-wing JetStar made its first flight in 1957 and entered service in 1961, establishing itself as one of the world’s premier business jets. The earlier versions were powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT-12 engines, with two each in pods mounted at the rear of the fuselage. (Later versions acquired quieter Garrett TFE731 turbofans.) Presley actually owned two of the airplanes. He purchased the first, a 1960 version, in 1975, the same year he bought a Convair 880 that he named Lisa Marie after his daughter. Both those airplanes are on display at Graceland, Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Webb estimates it will take about a year to convert the fuselage into an RV. In the meantime, he plans to take metal from the wings and other parts of the airplane and fashion it into memorabilia that he will sell to fund the project, and he will donate any surplus revenue to two of Elvis’s favorite charities, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep his legacy alive and to do what he would have wanted done,” Webb says. In the meantime, he will post about his progress on the Jimmy’s World YouTube channel.

Johnny D. Boggs, Art of the West columnist for Wild West magazine, picks his top 10 favorite living Western artists.

Bob Boze Bell 

The longtime editor of True West magazine has authored and illustrated biographies of such iconic Westerners as Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok and Doc Holliday. Bell is a gifted artist known for his surreal gouache paintings. “I’m just a cartoonist,” he says, “with strong opinions.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bob Boze Bell (@bozebell)

Nocona Burgess 

Immensely proud of his heritage, this great-great-grandson of Quanah Parker, the last Comanche war chief, is known for his bold acrylic paintings of Indian figures and culture and has moved into sculpture. “My dad always said, ‘Every morning when I wake up, I thank God I’m a Comanche,’” the artist recalls. 

Curtis Fort

Born and raised on a working ranch in New Mexico, Fort might be as close to a modern-day Charles M. Russell as we’ll find, right down to his realistic bronze sculptures and cowboy drawl. Most of his works elicit a smile.

Dennis Hogan

Douglas Magnus

Deana McGuffin

Those who don’t consider boot making an art form have never seen a pair of cowboy boots made by this Albuquerque legend, who followed a path her grandfather forged in Roswell back in 1917. McGuffin will soon “retire” to try her hand at leatherwork and woodwork.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Deana McGuffin (@mcguffincustomboots)

Barbara Meikle

Painter and sculptor Meikle is particularly drawn to that underappreciated hero of the American Southwest—the donkey. Rife with humor, her oils and bronzes also capture horses, Western wildlife and landscapes. She donates part of her earnings to equine rescue efforts and animal shelters.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Barbara Meikle (@barbmeiklefineart)

Billy schneck

thom ross

This quirky and highly opinionated San Francisco native loves the West, baseball and literature, not necessarily in that order. His offbeat interpretations of iconic Western figures challenge viewers. Ross’ most recent project tackles Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Thom Ross (@thomross_art)

Don Yena 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

See more stories

SubscriBE NOW!

 

Most Americans are familiar with the daring feats of the most decorated soldier in U.S. history, Audie Murphy. Scenes of the Colmar Pocket in France — Murphy climbing aboard a blazing tank destroyer, manning its machine gun, and single-handedly fighting off two reinforced companies of German infantry — may come to mind.

What is lesser known, or oft-forgotten, are the other hard fighting grunts of the 3rd Infantry Division, of which Murphy was a part.

From North Africa to the capture of Adolf Hitler’s lair in Berchtesgaden, Germany, the men of the 3rd ID slogged through it all, receiving the most medals of any other U.S. division in World War II along the way.

Discussing these feats and his latest work, “Against All Odds,” author, journalist and Resident Historian, Friends of the National World War II Memorial Alex Kershaw sat down with HistoryNet to share why the older he gets “the more grateful and proud I am of those young, working-class Americans that fought and died and gave everything so that I could have the life that I have. That’s not an exaggeration.”

You have a penchant for writing sweeping first-person accounts to deliver riveting WWII stories (“The Bedford Boys,” “The Liberator.”) What was your impetus for writing “Against All Odds”?

I came across the fact that the 3rd ID had received more medals than any other U.S. division in World War II. Officially, there were 40 named recipients of the Medal of Honor from the 3rd ID — it’s almost a quarter of all the Medals of Honor given out in the European theater. They lost more men than any other division and I would argue that they spent more days in combat than any other division in Europe.

I didn’t really know what I was going to do in terms of a book, but I wanted to go meet someone from the 3rd ID, so around 2019 I went and interviewed Bob Maxwell, who was, at the time, the oldest living recipient of the Medal of Honor.

He told me his story and I thought to myself, the 3rd ID had been there in North Africa in November 1942 and had the great honor of liberating Berchtesgaden in 1945. Many people think that it was the 101st but it wasn’t, it was the 3rd ID. They made damn sure they got there first. They were there at the start of the war and completed this incredible journey. That journey is the story of the liberation of Europe.

To that point, it’s rare that you find a British author writing about Americans.

It was really pretty interesting when I first started, because people were like, “This carpetbagging Limey, coming over here, writing about us!” I wanted to write about Americans fighting in Europe because I lived in America.

I wanted to celebrate the people in this country. It’s just as simple as that.

The men you focus on in your latest book all served in the 3rd ID. All four received the Medal of Honor, which seems quite rare for a single unit. How would you describe the ethos of the division?

The culture of the division was determined by one individual — Truscott [Gen. Lucian Truscott]. When they were in training in North Africa, they had to perform what was called the Truscott Trot. He was a cavalryman and he believed that infantry units should be able to move with the speed and agility of cavalry, that they should be highly mobile [and] cover as much ground as possible. He believed in long, forced marches, but not walking, not marching, literally almost trotting.

The men practiced that at great length in North Africa, so when they got to Sicily and they were chasing the Germans the ethos was, “You got to chase them fast because they retreat fast and we have to catch them on the move.”

They were extremely well-trained, really tough on the ground, very, very fit and aggressive.

It’s interesting because they are not that famous today. You know, people think about the 29th, the 101st, the 82nd Airborne. The 3rd ID didn’t have a [George] Patton, they didn’t have a general who was going to grab the headlines.

They also didn’t fight on D-Day, they weren’t at the Battle of the Bulge — which have been turned into famous movies. They had these battles that were long, hard slogs that most people have forgotten.

It’s interesting you say the men were well-trained, because the Americans didn’t have the best showing at the beginning of the war in North Africa.

No, not at all. Dogface soldier is the division anthem and if you ever read the lyrics to that it would give you an idea of who they saw themselves as. The idea of “we’re nothing special” in terms of seeking glory and publicity. “We just get the job done. We’re grunts. Ask us to do something and we’ll do it.” And they did.

Of the four men you focus on, Audie Murphy is best known. Can you talk about the other three — Maurice “Footsie” Britt, Michael Daly and Keith Ware?

I chose Maurice Britt because he was the first U.S. soldier to receive every medal of valor, and by that I mean [the] Bronze Star, Silver Star, DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) and the Medal of Honor.

It was a big deal when that happened, and he was willing to go along with the notion that he should be raising awareness for war bonds and that he was a public figure. He was described as the Alvin York of World War II. He was in the same division as Audie Murphy, who would later overtake him in the medal count.

I liked the fact that he had been a professional football player for the Detroit Lions, and I liked the fact that he was there at the beginning. He was there in North Africa, for Sicily, all the way through Italy, where he gained the Medal of Honor in the fall of 1943.

He participated in four amphibious invasions: North Africa, Sicily, southern Salerno and then the fourth at Anzio. He had his arm blown off at Anzio.

He received the Medal of Honor on June 5, 1944, at the Razorback Stadium in Arkansas, where he played in college.

I always thought that that was really poignant because the next day, the 6th of June, 1944, became the so called “one and only D-Day,” but most of these guys had already been in four D-Days.

I became very attached to Michael Daly as one of the other characters. I was very struck by the fact that he dropped out of West Point and joined up as a private to go and fight. His first combat experience was on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

He could have had a very cushy war, as his father was Col. Paul Daly, who knew Alexander Patch. Daly initially drove Patch around in his car. He was a very bad driver. Patch joked at some point, “I’m not gonna get killed by the Germans, but this 20-year-old kid is gonna kill me.” [laughs]

Daly could have ridden out the war in Patch’s headquarters, but he said no and joined the 15th Infantry Regiment at a time when the regiment had been really battered. Many of the guys who had been fighting had been traumatized — they had been through hell. By the end he had earned three Silver Stars, the Medal of Honor … the only medal he didn’t receive was the DSC. I just couldn’t believe that he was a company commander at 20 years old.

I was very moved by the fact that when he went back to the U.S. he struggled to adapt. He was looking for a cause greater than himself — for a mission in life that was as energizing and all-consuming as that of a company commander. For a long time, Daly struggled to find that, as I think a lot of those young men did. They were put in positions of great responsibility amid extreme danger, and thrived.

Against All odds

by Alex Kershaw, Dutton Caliber, March 22, 2022

get it on amazon

If you buy something through our site, we might earn a commission.

That struggle upon returning is understandable. What are you supposed to do back in the U.S., after all, when you’ve just finished saving the world?

Exactly. What do you do? A full company would be 180-200 guys — although that was never the case because they were always under strength. But in theory you have a 20-year-old in charge of 200 Americans.

Towards the end of the war in Nuremberg, Daly was doing everything. He did everything that he could first, ahead of the scouts. And the reason why he did that was because he wanted to keep those kids alive. That was an example of complete selflessness. Beautiful altruism.

When I was at college I studied philosophy for a while — this is a bit of a side angle — but I had to do an essay about altruism. Michael Daly was the definition of pure altruism. He was going to give his life willingly, at any second, to save the lives of other people. His Medal of Honor citation explains that perfectly. His actions seem to typify so many actions that I came across in 3rd ID.

You said in a recent interview that it was actually a small number of men who made a big difference in WWII. Can you expand on that?

This past September, I followed the route of the 3rd ID from Saint Tropez all the way to Colmar. I was in the vineyard where Audie Murphy lost his best friend, Lattie Tipton. We were within a stone’s throw of where Murphy’s action for the DSC happened. My point is, is that it’s really long way.

When we got to Colmar you see that you’re almost at the border of what was the Third Reich and I thought, “Oh, my God, if you’d landed in Casablanca in 1942 and you were still fighting and you saw that?” That’s a long, long way. It is an epic odyssey.

I think my point is, is that along that way, there were villages and towns and hillsides, streams and rivers that all have to be crossed. That comes down to individual soldiers. And if you look at some of the citations for the Medal of Honor for those in the 3rd ID it’s not an accident — individuals made a big difference.

I think you could say that many of the Medal of Honor recipients were men who were aggressive and daring and were prepared to attack and put their lives on the line to go after the enemy. But there weren’t that many. We have this idea that everyone was up for it during the war, but most just wanted to stay alive.

The U.S. had this beautifully attuned capitalist system to turn out what we needed in terms of materiel to win that war. But people still had to fight on the ground. However many weapons we had, however many Sherman tanks we had, we still had to win on the ground. It was critical that people stepped up. There were many people who were doing their jobs, but few who went above and beyond, which, from my point of view, is why the Medal of Honor rewards that kind of action.

I had the opportunity to interview Hershel “Woody” Williams and something he said has stuck with me — receiving the Medal of Honor saved his life because it forced him to talk about the worst moment of his life. His brother, who died young, fought in Bastogne and never emotionally recovered. How would you say these young men emotionally coped after coming home?

For many it was a mix. For Audie Murphy, I know that it was a burden to carry the moniker of the most decorated soldier of World War II. I write in my book about an Esquire journalist who went and interviewed Murphy in the 60s and he didn’t even have his full set of metals. Apparently, he had given some of his medals away to kids in the neighborhood.

I know that Michael Daly was a reluctant public hero when he came back. After his Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House, he was driving back to Connecticut and he said, “I wish my father had been the one that received the medal, not me.”

To be paraded as this public hero when you are deeply traumatized, when you are trying to recover — Daly had been shot through the face and was struggling to readjust to peacetime — it was difficult for a lot of them.

Keith Ware was incredibly modest. There were very few interviews and there was very little information about him that I could find. I never came across one interview with him in which he talks about the medal. He may have, but I couldn’t find anything.

It’s a small community of men and you’re under scrutiny, you’re under the microscope. I think they were incredibly proud.

[Bob] Maxwell said to me, “I’m no hero.” He received the medal because a grenade landed near him and he instinctively smothered it. He said, “I didn’t make a decision to do that. It was a split second and I just did it. I’ve been defined by a moment that I didn’t make a clear decision about.”

There are sadly no remaining Medal of Honor recipients from WWII. What would you say is an appropriate way to honor these men, not only on National Medal of Honor Day but throughout the year?

Whether it’s National Medal of Honor Day, Memorial Day or Veterans Day, I think that what all the World War II veterans I’ve interviewed would want most is for people to remember them, their brothers — to not forget and to remember them in a way that goes beyond just saying glibly, “Thank you for your service.” Remember what it took, what was sacrificed, what was given.

I think the lesson is that people are capable. People can be incredible. They can show us so much that’s unimaginable when they have a cause that’s greater than themselves.

historynet magazines

Our 9 best-selling history titles feature in-depth storytelling and iconic imagery to engage and inform on the people, the wars, and the events that shaped America and the world.

subscribe today

Once upon a time there was a “golden age” of air travel, when passengers wore suits and dresses to fly and airlines created colorful posters to tempt those well-dressed customers to exotic destinations like…Minnesota.

But not just Minnesota. Airlines used posters to tout the appeal of destinations all over the world—and to persuade potential customers that their carriers were the best way to get there. 

This was in the days when most people planning a trip had to visit a travel agent. Perhaps an eye-catching poster, one featuring the latest airliner soaring over a scenic vista, would be just the thing to seal the deal. 

In his book The Art of the Airways, Geza Szurovy traces the airline poster back to 1914, when the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line in Florida issued one to promote its “fast passenger and express service.” Early airline posters touted not just the novelty of flight, but also its safety. Once air travel became less novel after World War II, the posters stressed the destination, with the airplanes often reduced to a tiny image streaking across the top. Many of the artists who did these works have retreated into anonymity but some—like David Klein, who created the TWA San Francisco poster on the opposite page—became known for their poster work. 

Seeing images like these may make you feel nostalgic for a time when airline travel seemed a little magical. The posters may also make you wistfully contemplate airlines that have vanished, like bird species gone extinct. What remains is the allure of travel—no matter what you’re wearing.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

See more stories

Subscribe now