Fred Harman Jr. (American, 1902 to 1982)
Fred Harman was one of the five founders of the Cowboy Artists of America in 1965. Along with Joe Beeler, George Phippen, Johnny Hampton, and Charlie Dye, Harman helped shape the organization that would set the standard for contemporary art of the American West for decades to come. A rough draft of the organization’s guiding principles was developed by the founders in a bar in Sedona, Arizona. From that rather humble beginning, the group quickly added more members and held its first exhibition and sale at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame (now the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum) in Oklahoma City a few months later. The sale-exhibition has been an annual event ever since and is now held at the Phoenix Art Museum. In many ways, the success of the Cowboy Artists of America has led to the great popularity that American Western Art has enjoyed in the four decades since the group’s inception.
Prior to the organization’s founding, Harman was a well known and widely read newspaper cartoonist. His syndicated strip Red Ryder and Little Beaver appeared in 750 newspapers with a readership of forty million people. Harman grew up in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where his family had established a homestead in the 1890s. He began drawing Red Ryder in 1938 and continued the strip until 1963 when he devoted his talent solely to painting the history and colorful tales of his native West.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, January 2009.