Return of Summer by Tucker Smith - Signed

Prix de West Winner 1990, the highest prize of the National Academy of Western Art.

Signed

Print: 33 x 25 inches

The location of the painting is the area just east of the Rocky Mountains in Montana. It's call the Rocky Mountain front - where the plains meet the mountains.

This is early summer when the cloud shadows drift across the prairies where the green grass has returned. Here the grasses are flowering but there's still snow on the peaks.

The prairie is very colorful with all kinds of flowers. The renewed plant life, the crisp atmosphere and the lingering snow in the high country certainly lifts one's spirit.

“Painting is ninety percent work,” says Tucker Smith. “The rest is talent, but talent isn’t something you’re simply born with. Talent requires a great deal of perseverance.”

Smith is well known for his painstaking approach to art. He does research, paints on location, and labors at his easel until he feels the work is exactly right.

“I suppose I’m a perfectionist,” he says, and then adds with his customary modesty, “but it turns out all right in the end, I guess.”

Today Tucker Smith’s art is part of the permanent collections of such respected galleries as the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma and the American West Art Museum in Wyoming.

Smith is a member of the National Academy of Western Art and is the recipient of many major art awards, including the prestigious Prix de West.

Smith lives with his wife, Jean, on a small ranch in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. There they have raised two sons and many quarter horses. The boys are grown now and out on their own, and there are only a few riding horses left in the stable, but the Smiths still live a picturesque life that is well suited to Tucker’s reputation as one of the country’s finest artists of the West.