This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The following is from Ken Schmidt, from Yakima Washington. The Tschudy painting referred to below was left to him by his grandmother, Gladys (Mrs. Rudolph) Schmidt.
The attached file was copied from what appears to be a promotional tour flier attached to the back of an original July 1938 water color from New Mexico. The back of the painting has a signed inscription as follows: "After a (leary?) rain in the mountains in July at Meutmore, New Mexico, the river was transformed from a trickling stream through a dry bed into a raging swirling torrent of water and mud." Signed - dated July 1938.
HERBERT BOLIVAR TSCHUDY
1874 1946
Herbert B. Tschudy was born in Plattsburg, Ohio of Swiss ancestry and died in New York in April of this year. He was an unusual figure in the art world, packing at least six successful careers into an amazing life. An architect, graduate of Illinois University, he decided as a young man to devote his life to art and entered the famous Art Students League in New York.
He later spent twenty years in the West painting, and fifteen years as curator of Contemporary Art at Brooklyn Museum. He also joined West Indian Expeditions where he did under-sea studies of marine life, and he served on National Science expeditions as an illustrator. His watercolors, black and whites, and oils have been exhibited from coast to coast and in many European capitals. A recognized authority on art, he has made numerous public appearances and talks over the radio.
Tschudy's work in the West has won him much renown, and his Southwest pictures are outstanding in their fine free style and unusual handling of the brilliant colors of that area. A number are hung permanently in the New Mexico Museum at Santa Fe, and a number of these appear in the present exhibit.
The artist made three extended tours in Europe, the last beginning in 1936 and ending as he left the continent just ahead of the Nazi invasion. He painted in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, and his work was represented by hangings in the National Galleries of these three countries. Some of the European work appears in this exhibit.
The painters devotion to his work was rewarded prior to his recent death by permanent hanging of his paintings is such famous places as the Metropolitan, Whitney Gallery, Grosvenor Gallery in London, Philadelphia Museum, Brooklyn Museum, New York Historical Society, New York Aquarium, American Museum of National History, and others. He is also represented in many private collections.
In speaking of Tschudy, one leading New York critic said: "He had a big reputation in England and was a frequent exhibitor. He won first prize in the Panama Pacific Exposition. His reputation here and abroad rests as much on his oils as on his watercolors. In his watercolors he paints in broad fluid washes of color, but preserves a firm structural scene, nothing is haphazard or accidental. His effects are not attained by an emotional running together of washes, but are carefully planned."
The Art News said: "The end of a day, or a cloudburst when sky and land meet, are Tschudys favorite subjects and he paints them with dramatic resonant color and with robust freedom."
The Art Digest commented: "Tschudy's work impresses one with a quality only too rare in landscape painting that of a delicate balance between the artists expression and the sensitively-observed fact. There is nothing haphazard in Tschudys fluent brushwork. Sound composition, integration of light and color patterns with design are to be noted in all the work. While there is refinement in the melting color and subtlety in play of light, there is everywhere breadth and vitality in the handling."
The New York Journal-American reported: "Mr. Tschudy displays not only a flair for the pictorial, but an ability to render a feel of place, a particular mood of nature, a curious balance between the essential quality of a scene and its ephemeral moment of time and season.
There should be a special chapter devoted to the skies in his landscapes, particularly those of the Southwest with their infinity of expanse through which a panorama of clouds sweeps, sometimes heavy rain clouds almost hanging over the flat plains beneath, again an incredible suffusion of splendor in reflected lights and sunset colors."
The people of this community are fortunate to have this opportunity to purchase these original paintings by this famous artist.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Plattsburgh, Ohio, Herbert Tschudy (H.B. Judy) was a New York
based artist who did much painting in the West and by 1935 was being
referred to in New York reviews "as a painter of the Southwest."
He
studied at the Art Students League in New York City, and then worked at
the Brooklyn Museum. He became a member of the Brooklyn Society of
Modern Artists, the American Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia Water
Color Club and the American Federation of the Arts.
About
1914, he went on a Western sketching expedition to Arizona, California,
and Glacier National Park, and then used the sketches to create
installations at the Boston Museum. After that trip, he was a regular
visitor to the West, and his work was acquired by the Santa Fe Museum.
In the early 1900s, traveling with his ethnographer friend, Stewart Culin, he was at the Hubbell Trading Post in
Ganado, and created one of the miniature rug designs from which J.L.
Hubbell, owner of the trading post, could market the Navajo rugs. Judy
did enough business with Hubbell that Hubbell owed him money, and wrote
in November, 1905: "my debt to you will be cleaned out as soon as I can
possibly get out of the present hole". (Blue, 207)
A
1934 New York exhibition at Fifteen Gallery of his work was about half New Mexico scenes,
and he was identified as a "painter of the Southwest." Some of his
paintings he signed "Judy," including an oil painting, Hubbell Hill, that is in the collection of the J. L. Hubbell Collection at Ganado, Arizona.
Sources:
Martha Blue, Indian Trader, the Life and Times of J.L. Hubbell
Doris Dawdy, Artists of the American West, Volume II
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