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.
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.
Charles Marion Russell, also known as C. M. Russell, Charlie Russell, and "Kid" Russell, was an American artist of the Old American West. Russell created more than 2,000 paintings of cowboys, Indians, and landscapes set in the Western United States and in Alberta, Canada, in addition to bronze sculptures. Known as 'the cowboy artist', Russell was also a storyteller and author. He became an advocate for Native Americans in the West, for instance supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation established for them in Montana. In 1916 Congress passed legislation to create such a reservation, now known as the Rocky Boy Reservation.
Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor and writer who specialized in depictions of the American Old West. A member of the second generation of Hudson River School artists, Remington's works are known for depicting the Western United States in the last quarter of the 19th-century, featuring such images as cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry.
A greeting card is an illustrated piece of card stock or high quality paper featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays, such as Halloween, they are also sent to convey thanks or express other feelings. Greeting cards, usually packaged with an envelope, come in a variety of styles. There are both mass-produced as well as handmade versions that are distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. While typically inexpensive, more elaborate cards with die-cuts or glued-on decorations may be more expensive.
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, with more than 28,000 Western and American Indian 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.
Joseph Jacinto Mora was a Uruguayan-born American cartoonist, comics artist, illustrator and cowboy, who lived with the Hopi and wrote extensively about his experiences in California. He was an artist-historian, sculptor, painter, photographer, illustrator, muralist and author. He has been called the "Renaissance Man of the West".
Charles Franklin Reaugh, known as Frank Reaugh, was an artist, photographer, inventor, patron of the arts, and teacher, who was called the "Dean of Texas Painters". He devoted his career to the visual documentation in pastel and paint, portraying the vast, still unsettled regions of the Great Plains and the American Southwest. He was active in the Society of Western Artists.
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.
Howard Terpning is an American painter and illustrator best known for his paintings of Native Americans.
Hallmark Cards, Inc. is a private, family-owned American company based in Kansas City, Missouri. Founded in 1910 by Joyce Hall, Hallmark is the oldest and largest manufacturer 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.
Samuel David Smith was an American artist.
The Rockwell Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate museum of American art located in the Finger Lakes region 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.
Thomas Crane (1843–1903) was an English illustrator and art director at Marcus Ward & Co. known for his colourful children's books and decorative greeting cards which often incorporated floral motifs.
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.
