Archie Boyd Teater

Archie Boyd Teater (May 5, 1901 - July 18, 1978) was an American landscape and genre artist who painted in an impressionist style. He has been estimated to have painted more than 4000 paintings in his lifetime, making him one of the "most prolific painters in the U.S." His work featured western scenes, mining camps, Jackson Hole, the Teton Mountains, San Francisco buildings, and still lifes: strawberries, potatoes, and oranges.

Of the subsequent Jackson Hole artists, he is probably the best known. In terms of painting the Tetons and Jackson Hole, Archie is totally without peer.—Lester Taylor, a part-time Teton Valley resident.

The first artist he ever saw was an itinerant 'potboiler' painter set up in the window of a store in his hometown. Another tale is that at age 15 he met a buckeye artist, one that travels and paints portraits for a living. His first canvas may have been cut from the covering of a sheepherder's wagon.

He repaired fences for ranchers in exchange for the weathered tops of wooden posts for use in carving. Some of his first paintings were destroyed by cork-soled boots of loggers, yet his first sale was to a lumberjack for fifty cents.

He lived in poverty as a child and young man, yet in the mid-1950s built the Archie Teater Studio, the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in the state of Idaho, and spent much of the last 20 years of his life traveling and painting in more than 100 countries, crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth on one occasion, and on the Concord on another.

He died with a substantial estate, and his large personal collection of paintings was left to a foundation for handicapped children.

He once spent a night in jail for painting the rear-end of a buffalo in the Central Park Zoo in New York City. He never finished eighth grade, yet he studied with some of the country's finest artists. And he could well have been the most prolific U.S. artist ever, with paintings numbering in the thousands that range from raw turn-of-the-century logging and mining camps in the West, to the majestic grandeur of the Grand Teton Mountains of Wyoming, street scenes in cowboy and mining towns, St. Patrick's Cathedral and Central Park in New York, the San Francisco skyline, exotic markets in North Africa, the Near East and Asia, plus what at the time he painted it was acclaimed to be the only historically accurate rendition of Custer's Last Stand.

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