Archie Boyd Teater - Death

Death

At the time of his death, he was one of the country's best-known western landscape artists. He had had one-man shows in New York City, his paintings had hung in shows in the Metropolitan and other museums, as well as in U.S. Embassies around the world, he had been featured in articles in Better Homes and Gardens, Cosmopolitan, Flair, Ideals, Look, and Quick Magazines, and his paintings were in a number of important private collections, including those of Averill Harriman, Lawrence Rockefeller, Godfrey Rockefeller, George S. Amory, Bennett Cerf, Henry P. Cole, and Mrs. Charles de Rham. Yet, following his death he fell into almost total obscurity, so that today he is largely known only by those who own his paintings and the now rapidly disappearing coterie of people (centered mostly in Boise, Idaho, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming) who knew him and his wife personally.

All his life, Teater was a nomad who never remained long in one place. When he was 14, he lived in a cave in Malad Canyon in the Thousand Springs region of the Snake River in south-western Idaho. When he was 15 and 16, he lived in a horse-drawn covered wagon. With his brothers, he built a corral in the Snake River to hold sturgeon that they had captured, in anticipation of selling the giant fish to mining companies for food for their mining crews. In the mid-1920s, he spent summers trekking with a string of pack burros through the Sawtooth Mountains prospecting for gold, sketching, and painting. By the summer of 1928, he had acquired a Model T Ford and ventured for the first time into Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to paint the Grand Tetons. This visit initiated a lifelong love affair with the Tetons, and he spent virtually every summer thereafter in Jackson Hole for the rest of his life. During his first summers in the Tetons, he would begin the season by working for the U.S. Forest Service constructing trails in the then nascent Grand Teton National Park. But as soon as he had a few dollars, he would quit working in order to spend the rest of the summer painting. His first galleries were in the open air on the shore of Jenny Lake at the base of the Tetons. In the mid-1940s he became known as 'Teton Teater' for his beautiful paintings of the Tetons. A ridge in the Tetons became known as 'Teater's Ridge' because of the large amount of time he spent on it. In the late 1930s, his 'studio' in Jackson was in the back of a truck parked near the creek on the north side of town. His first formal gallery in Jackson, in 1941, was in space rented from the Railway Express Office.