Background
The first cowboy Christmas card was created by the famous Montana artist, Charles M. Russell, one hundred years ago. Fifty years later, Robert R. Lorenz, a student at Colorado A&M University, began to sell his own cowboy Christmas designs at the local bookstores in Fort Collins, Colorado, delivering a few boxes at a time on his bicycle.
In 1949, Trumble met Lorenz and the two young war veterans enjoyed an instant friendship. Trumble, an employee of Western Live Stock magazine in Denver, had been reared on a cattle-feeding farm in Nebraska and shared Lorenz's consuming interest in the cowboy West. With a handshake, they formed a partnership that was to last fifteen years and called it "The Lazy RL Ranch." Lorenze designed four Christmas cards and Trumble marketed them through a small mail-order ad in the magazine's October issue, immediately resulting in surprising sums of cash orders.
Over the years, while traveling about the West in search of new paintings to publish, Trumble became acquainted with virtually every western artists of the day and developed a passionate interest in collecting their work. His partner Lorenz died in 1965, his lifetime dream of having his real Wyoming ranch unfulfilled. Trumble continued on with his own greeting card enterprise, renaming it "Leanin' Tree," and the company embarked on a long period of growth. All the while the young entrepreneur was building and refining an impressive collection of post-1950 fine art of the American West.
In 1974, Trumble opened a small public art exhibit area as part of a new company plant. Twenty-five years later, the Leanin' Tree Museum had expanded to display 250 major paintings and 150 important bronze sculptures.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses, was an American folk artist. She began painting in earnest at the age of 78 and is a prominent example of a newly successful art career at an advanced age. Moses gained popularity during the 1950s, having been featured on a cover of Time Magazine in 1953. She was a subject of numerous television programs and of a 1950 Oscar-nominated biographical documentary. Her autobiography, titled My Life's History, was published in 1952. She was also awarded two honorary doctoral degrees.
A Christmas card is a greeting card sent as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to Christmastide and the holiday season. Christmas cards are usually exchanged during the weeks preceding Christmas Day by many people in Western society and in Asia. The traditional greeting reads "wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year". There are innumerable variations on this greeting, many cards expressing more religious sentiment, or containing a poem, prayer, Christmas song lyrics or Biblical verse; others focus on the general holiday season with an all-inclusive "Season's greetings". The first modern Christmas card was by John Calcott Horsley.
Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Charles Marion Russell, also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell, was an American artist of the American Old West. He created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Native Americans, and landscapes set in the western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. He is known as "the cowboy artist" and was also a storyteller and author. He became an advocate for Native Americans in the west, supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana. In 1916, Congress passed legislation to create the Rocky Boy Reservation.
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, with more than 28,000 Western and Native American art works and artifacts. The facility also has the world's most extensive collection of American rodeo photographs, barbed wire, saddlery, and early rodeo trophies. Museum collections focus on preserving and interpreting the heritage of the American West. The museum becomes an art gallery during the annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition and Sale each June. The Prix de West Artists sell original works of art as a fund raiser for the museum. The expansion and renovation was designed by Curtis W. Fentress, FAIA, RIBA of Fentress Architects.
Thomas Richman Blackshear II is an African-American artist whose paintings adorn many Evangelical churches. He is also a sculptor and a designer of stamps and ornaments, often with African American or Western themes.
Frank Tenney Johnson was a painter of the Old American West, and he popularized a style of painting cowboys which became known as "The Johnson Moonlight Technique". Somewhere on the Range is an example of Johnson's moonlight technique. To paint his paintings he used knives, fingers and brushes.
Josephine Wall is an English fantasy artist and sculptor.
Harold Dow Bugbee was an American Western artist, illustrator, painter, and curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas. Bugbee sought with considerable success to become the dominant artist of the Texas South Plains, as his role model, Charles M. Russell of Montana, accordingly sketched life of the northern Great Plains.
Hallmark Cards, Inc. is a privately held, family-owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce Hall, Hallmark is one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of greeting cards in the United States. In 1985, the company was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Jack Van Ryder was an American cowboy and western artist, his colorful life was a series of cinematic moments, the fodder that inspired his distinctively western art. He punched cows and drove freight wagons. He chased wild horses and rode bucking broncos all the way from the Powder River to the Gila, from Cheyenne to Carson City, from Butte to Bisbee. Ryder's soft pastels colored paintings captured the dusty brooding southwestern twilight skies.
T. Allen Lawson is an American artist recognized for his landscape paintings of Wyoming and Maine subjects, and is perhaps best known for having painted the White House Christmas card in 2008. His work is characterized by patient observation of nature and an interest in abstract design. He is a resident of Rockport, Maine.
Howard Lockhart Fogg was an American artist specializing in railroad art.
The Shortening Winter's Day is Near a Close (1903) and its replicas -- The Shortening Winter's Day is Near a Close and Beneaththe Snow Encumbered Branches -- are oil on canvas paintings by Scottish painter Joseph Farquharson. The iconic artworks depict a shepherd tending sheep with the evening sun shining through snowy trees.
The Rockwell Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of American art located in the Southern Tier region of New York in downtown Corning, New York. Frommer's describes it as "one of the best-designed small museums in the Northeast." In 2015, The Rockwell Museum was named a Smithsonian Affiliate, the first in New York State outside of New York City.
Robert Wesley Amick (1879–1969) was an American painter, illustrator and teacher who specialized in romantic paintings of the early western history of the United States. Amick studied at the Art Students' League of New York and the Yale School of Fine Art. He is best known for his American Old West art but painted equine, landscape and genre art of both eastern and western scenes during the Arts and Crafts era. He is perhaps best known for twelve paintings of the American West that were widely reproduced in art prints for use in American schools. These and his portrait of the racehorse Man o' War are perhaps amongst his most memorable works.
Hildred R. Goodwine Phillips, usually known professionally as Hildred Goodwine, was an artist, sculptor and illustrator best known for her paintings of horses, western scenes and animals.
Harry Andrew Jackson, born Harry Aaron Shapiro Jr., was an American artist. He began his career as a Marine combat artist, then later worked in the abstract expressionist, realist, and American western styles.
Jenne Magafan (1916-1952) was an American painter and muralist. During her short-lived career, she became a successful mural painter in the 1930s and early 1940s. She gained national prominence for her work in the New Deal art program. Her twin sister Ethel Magafan was also a muralist.
Ross Stefan was an American artist known for his paintings, drawings, and pastels focusing on the iconography and imagery of the American West.
