Biography from Blue Coyote Gallery:
| Western artist Marjorie Reed is best known for her paintings of the
stage stations and scenes along the Butterfield Overland Stage
Route. Born in Springfield, Illinois in 1915, she grew up in Los
Angeles where her father, Walter Reed, was an illustrator for Walt
Disney. She claimed that as a young girl her inner urge to draw horses
was so strong that she would sometimes walk up to eighteen miles just
to sit on a corral fence and sketch the horses in action. This inner
drive combined with her father’s tutelage and her mother’s love of art helped Marjorie develop her talent at a young age.
By her early teens she had already designed Christmas cards for several
major companies. At the age of fourteen, while working for a Disney
Studios subsidiary, her work was recognized by Walt Disney himself.
Impressed by her talent, Disney gave her a position in the animation
department. However she quit not long afterwards, commenting in
later years that she could never adjust to the regimentation required
by animation work.
After graduating from Glendale High School she attended Chouinard Art
School and the Art Center school in Los Angeles. Yet she credited
her most important formal training to well known California landscape
artist Jack Wilkinson Smith. She also credited Smith with
encouraging her to roam the California countryside for inspiration.
During one of her trips she came in contact with Captain William
Banning, who had been an actual stage coach driver for his father, Phineas
Banning, the “Father of Los Angeles Harbor” and the owner of Southern
California shipping empire. Immediately captivated by Banning’s
knowledge of stage coaches and horse teams, Marjorie was influeced by Banning to embark on a project that set the course for her signature work.
Tracing the Butterfield Overland stage route through California, she
created a series of twenty paintings, each one a representation of the
various stage stations or other well known locations along the
routes. For authenticity and to realistically capture the
essence of the route, Reed camped out at every stage station she
painted. When the series was finished in 1958, the entire collection of
twenty paintings was purchased by James S. Copley, owner and publisher
of the San Diego Union Tribune.
The success of this project led to a series of subsequent projects
which traced the Butterfield route from California eastward all the way
to it’s origin in Tipton, Missouri. She completed a series of paintings
for every state along the way: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and
finally Missouri. The result was a series of paintings that at
the time captured national attention for it’s historical as well as
artistic aspects. A total of four books were eventually published
based on these paintings. One each for California and Arizona,
another for New Mexico and Texas, and the fourth one for the remaining
three states.
Reed’s early start in life allowed her make her living as an artist for
over 65 years. As a result she left behind a very large body of work
which consists primarily of Western themes. Although she is best
known for her Butterfield paintings, her subject matter was known to
range from placid paintings of burros (which she raised most of her
life) to conquistadors to cowboys on bucking broncs to Western
landscapes. In the 1940’s, she painted “quite a lot of canyon scenes”
as well as many stage scenes under the pseudonym of Harvey Day, which
was actually the name of her second husband who had a job in the Grand Canyon
area. It was not unheard of at the time for women artists to paint
using men’s names for commercial purposes. Yet Reed claimed in a 1995
letter that she instead used her husband’s name because at the time
there was so much demand for her work that “perhaps I could get a
little break from a too busy life”.
In the 1970’s, Bank One in Tucson commissioned her to do a series of
Navajo scenes from the Four Corners area. Seven of the paintings still
hang today of the Bank One in Tucson. Not long afterwards a private
collector commissioned her to do a series of nine paintings with Hopi
scenes in the Three Mesas area. In addition to the original Butterfield
paintings she did hundreds more of both Butterfield and other stage coach
scenes.
Reed claimed to have moved over eighty times in her life, spending most
of her years in Arizona and Southern California. Her longest stay
in one place was spent in the Tombstone area where she used to own and
operate the Adobe Gallery in the 1960’s and 70’s. On Sunday
nights she would teach art classes for elementary school kids at the
gallery.
Throughout her life she was deeply religious in nature. Reed
claimed in a letter to a friend once that she “never painted
anything. I just held the brush and God did the work.” She
also felt her art was inspired partly as a result of the frustration
she felt in being denied a ranching life. The pleasure
experienced by those who enjoyed her work then alleviated this
frustration, a frustration she claimed could only be alleviated “by
returning the gift of the Creator.”
Marjorie Reed died while raking leaves a few days after Thanksgiving in
1996 at Campbell Ranch in Vallecito, California. Fittingly
enough, Vallecito was a master station on the Butterfield Route and was
a location which she painted several times. Not far from Vallecito is
La Casa Del Zorro resort in Borrego Springs, where many of the original
Butterfield California paintings purchased by the Copley family still
hang today.
Her work is also featured at the Julian Pioneer Museum in Julian, California.
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Biography from The Meadowlark Gallery, Inc.:
| Marjorie Reed a.k.a. Harvey Day (1915-1997)
Marjorie
Reed a.k.a. Harvey Day was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1915. She
was the daughter of a commercial artist. Raised in Los Angeles, she was
the pupil of her father in designing Christmas Cards. At fourteen, she
worked for Walt Disney. She studied at the Chouinard Art School and the
Art Center School in Los Angeles, as well as with Jack Wilkinson Smith
of Alhambra for two years.
A series of twenty paintings of the
1858 Butterfield Overland Stage from St. Louis to San Francisco was
incorporated into the book, "The Colorful Butterfield Overland Stage"
by Richard F. Pourade. As to her pen or brush name, the following came
from an authentication done by the artist, herself.
"Dear
Terry, Please excuse the delay in answering your interesting note of
September 14. Yes that is an older painting of mine, Harvey Day was my
deceased husband as there was such a demand of my depression priced
paintings, I decided to use his name and perhaps I could get a little
relief from a too busy life. Incidentally I have always known that God
painted all the paintings I just held held the brush' The particular
painting was done in the early 40's. I had lived for a few years at the
Grand Canyon. My husband had a job in the area., so I painted quite a
few canyon scenes. As I have never changed my price you can imagine how
very long I am with orders. Thanks for your kind interest in God's and
my work. Most sincerely, Marjorie Reed."
|
Biography from AskART:
| Born in Springfield, Illinois and raised in Los Angeles, Marjorie Reed gained a
reputation for paintings of western scenes, particularly Butterfield
Overland Stage coaches and other scenes of cowboys, horses and figures
associated with the Overland Mail Route. Sometimes she signed her
paintings with men's names including Harvey Day and Fred Day.
At age three, she
began art lessons from her father, Walter Stephen Reed, a commercial
artist, whom she later assisted in the designing of Christmas cards and
with illustrations for the Mickey Mouse Beverage Company, affiliated
with Walt Disney. In fact, she was so accomplished that shortly
after, she was hired by Walt
Disney Studios to do animation. But she did not like the
regimentation
of that work.
In the mid-1930s, she studied at the Chouinard Art School and took lessons from Jack
Wilkinson Smith, a renowned landscape painters who was a key artist in establishing
the Biltmore Salon in Los Angeles. Knowing her love of the outdoors and
horses, he encouraged her to roam the countryside. She became a friend
of Captain William Banning who had been a stagecoach driver for his
father Phineas Banning. She learned the romantic story of the
Butterfield Overland Mail Stage, which, from 1857 to 1858, ran from San
Francisco to the Yuma crossing on the Colorado River.
In her
Model-T Ford with her Alaskan Husky dog, she, based in Los Angeles from
the late 1930s to late 1940s, traveled the stage-coach route and
sketched for the paintings of her project to learn about and sketch
various points along the route. Her travels included Palm
Springs, which she visited many times after her first stop in 1937, and
she also spent time in Julian, a California mountain town.
Her "Butterfield Stage" series, about the 1858 Butterfield Overland Stage from St. Louis to San Francisco were
completed in 1957 after years of travel and research, and a book titled The Colorful Overland Stage
was
published with twenty of her color reproductions and text by Richard
Pourade. In 1967, she finished a second set of Overland Stage
illustrations focused on Arizona. A third set was then devoted to
New Mexico and Texas and a fourth set to Oklahoma, Arkansas and
Missouri.
In her later years, she and her fourth husband, Cecil Creese,
a miner, became residents of Tombstone, Arizona in 1963 after living in northern California on the Placer River.
According to her
daughter, Judy Morris, Marjorie Reed died in 1997, living in the desert
near the Butterfield Stage Station in California.
Exhibition venues included the Biltmore Salon and Ebell Salon in Los
Angeles, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Desert Inn Gallery in Palm
Springs, and the Palm Desert Art Gallery in Palm Desert, and the
Rosequist Gallery in Tucson, Arizona.
Sources:
Phil Kovinick and Marion Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West
Peggy and Harold Samuels, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West
Edan Hughes, Artists in California 1760-1940
|
Biography from AskART:
| The following is from David Kress:
I
met Marjorie in Tombstone, Arizona during the fall of 1987 at her small
gallery. It was definitely a quaint old place which I believe was
either a stage coach or pony express stop- every bit the proper setting
for her and a gallery for her paintings.
Although I only met her
a few times she definitely was a lovely old lady from the past. As I
was currently stationed with the U.S. Army a few miles away, we talked
of some of the places we both knew. The most favorite that she loved to
talk about was her beloved Bedouins in Saudi Arabia. She called them
'her children". I believe she had been on a religious retreat or
mission and spent quite some time with them. She felt that they and the
Indians of the past that she knew were much the same.
I had been
stationed several times at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, which had been an old
fort in 'Indian territory', so naturally I had become an history buff.
So naturally that led to a discussion about some of her current
paintings. One particular painting caught my eye. It depicted
several members of an Indian family riding in a horse drawn wagon
traveling through the snow to an old fireplace lit sod house. The
painting is called Winter Eve at Kaibito Trading Post.
I
loved talking to that old lady and planned to again, but a few months
later I was transferred to Germany. Although I had thought of her many
times, especially as I gaze at her paintings, and wanted to see her, I
never made it back to Tombstone, Arizona.
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