Harrison R. Crandall
Harris on R. (Hank) Crandall(1887–1970) was an outstanding national park artist who deserves recognition among the luminaries of the early national park movement. His early life was marked by exploration, from his home on a berry farm in Kansas, to art schools in Kansas and California, and to a commercial sign shop in smalltown Idaho. However, he seemed destined from childhood to focus his six-decade-long art career on creating a vision of his sacred mountains, Wyoming’s Teton Range, and Grand Teton National Park. He was the park’s first and only official photographer and Jackson Hole’s first resident artist.Upon moving to Teton country, Crandall opened a picture shop and art studio in a rustic log building that he constructed on his homestead, where he and his wife, Hilda, learned to carve out a pioneer life among abundant scenery, wildlife, interesting neighbors, mountaineers, and dude ranch guests. Crandall’s landscape oil paintings offered near photographic realism rendered in bold, amplified colors, and sometimes created on very large canvases. His favorite photographic compositions captured the Tetons with luminous skies, cowgirls and cowboys in action with their horses, Native Americans at their powwows, and wildflowers in portraiture.Crandall’s art now graces many American ranches and homes, but his Teton landscapes were also prized by the National Park Service managers of the early twentieth century, who were striving to create, define, and attract visitors to the parks before mass tourism. Horace Albright, director of the National Park Service from 1929 to 1933, said it best when he remembered Crandall as one of “nature’s noblemen.” Albright predicted that Crandall’s contributions would figure prominently in the history of Grand Teton National Park. Crandall’s professional instincts could not be contained by a single creative endeavor. In addition to his landscape art, he was also a photographer, musician, vaudevillian-style actor, architect, cinematographer, and park concessionaire and businessman. In addition to showcasing many original color paintings, drawings, and illustrations, this volume also includes a wealth of archival photographs, many of which have never before been published, resulting in both a visual treat for the eyes and an authoritative chronicle of Harrison Crandall’s life and work.