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 Marjorie Jane Reed  (1915 - 1996)
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Lived/Active: Arizona/California      Known for: stagecoach genre paintings, landscape
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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.

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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