“I want my work to talk to the ordinary cowhand, as well as to experts who know a good deal about painting, in the same way that art of the Italian Renaissance talks to everyone.” If Harry Jackson, the painter of pictures of life on the range, had been shown this statement a dozen years ago and told that he himself would utter it in 1967, he would undoubtedly have laughed derisively. His reaction would not have been surprising, for in the late nineteen forties and early fifties, Harry Jackson was a member of that most un-Italian-Renaissance school of painting, Abstract Expressionism. Like many artists in the immediate postwar years, he had found traditional American painting dull and uninteresting and had turned elsewhere for inspiration, particularly to the French painter Matisse and the American drip-and-dribble master Jackson Pollock. His own work, brightly colored and fashionably abstract, had earned him two important exhibitions in New York and a leading critic’s encomium: “most talented young painter in America.” Yet as soon as success as a modernist was his, Harry Jackson rejected it and sought other paths. The paintings reproduced in AMERICAN HERITAGE are the result.

Jackson has always loved to draw. As a child in Chicago, where he was born in 1924, he spent hours sketching soldiers and animals, and while still in his teens he began to study painting at Chicago’s Art Institute. But in 1938, at the age of fourteen, he did something dramatic, something perhaps as important for the future direction of his art as that later decision to abandon abstract painting: he ran away from home and became a ranch hand in Wyoming. After that the memories of the West—the vast open spaces, the cattle, and the loneliness of the cowboy—would always be vivid in his imagination. When Harry Jackson said later that he gave up abstraction because he felt that it was too limiting, that he wanted “to paint everything from satin to saddles,” the saddles go back to those early days in Wyoming.

In 1942, after the United States had entered the Second World War, Jackson joined the Marines, and in the course of making reconnaissance sketches, was wounded on Tarawa and Saipan. Sent back to Los Angeles as an official Marine artist, he discovered modern art; and like most young American painters of the period, when the war ended he headed for New York to study. It was there during the next decade that his abstract paintings won him high recognition.

His dissatisfaction with the canvases he was producing is best explained by Jackson himself in an interview he gave in 1956, two years after he had quit the modernists: “I began to realize that there was more to art than just letting yourself go with paint. I felt like a traveller who had followed a road as far as it could take him in his direction. Now I was at the fork and had to let that road