Howard Terpning

Howard Terpning was born on November 5, 1927, in Oak Park, Illinois. At seventeen he joined the United States Marine Corps, serving in China during the final phase of World War II. After leaving the Marines, he used the G.I. Bill to enroll in the two-year commercial art program at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, followed by six months of further study in life drawing and painting at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, where he also trained under the illustrator Haddon Sundblom. No source documents a formal degree from either school.

Terpning worked roughly eight years as a commercial illustrator in Chicago before moving to New York City, where he spent about twenty-five years illustrating for magazines including Time, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, Field and Stream, and Cosmopolitan, and producing film-poster art, including the poster for The Sound of Music. He turned to painting the American West and the historical life of Plains Indian peoples full time in the mid-1970s, joining the Cowboy Artists of America in 1979. He continues to live and work in Tucson, Arizona, and remains active in his studio.

Terpning's standing rests less on mainstream art criticism than on sustained recognition from the institutions closest to Western American art. He has received more than forty Cowboy Artists of America awards between 1980 and 2002, including multiple gold and Artists' Choice honors, and in 2001 he became only the third artist to receive the Eiteljorg Museum Award for Excellence, a career achievement honor tied to his solo exhibition there. The Autry Museum of the American West has recognized him repeatedly through its Masters of the American West exhibition. His 2018 retrospective, Howard Terpning: 70 Years of Art, at the Booth Western Art Museum was widely described as the first exhibition to survey his full career, from early commercial illustration through his fine-art paintings of Plains Indian life. Southwest Art magazine, marking that show, highlighted the scope of his career recognition, pointing to his more than forty Cowboy Artists of America awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award, and decades of additional honors from Western art institutions.

Terpning's market operates within the specialist niche of Western American art, sold primarily through auction houses such as Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, Scottsdale Art Auction, and Jackson Hole Art Auction rather than the major international contemporary-art salerooms. His current auction high is Paper That Talks Two Ways: The Treaty Signing, which sold for USD 2,360,000 at Coeur d'Alene Art Auction's July 15, 2023 sale in Reno, Nevada, a price the house has described as a world record for the artist. That figure surpassed an earlier record set by Captured Ponies, which sold for USD 1,934,000 on March 21, 2012, and, before that, by Search for the Renegades, which had sold for USD 1,456,000 at an earlier Coeur d'Alene Art Auction sale (sources vary on the exact year, with one citing 2006). The steady progression of record prices points to sustained, rather than speculative, demand for his best paintings.

No catalogue raisonne of Terpning's work has been identified, so provenance and authenticity rest on the record-keeping of the auction houses and galleries that have handled his paintings for decades, principally Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, Settlers West Gallery, and the print publisher The Greenwich Workshop. Original oils rarely appear at auction and the market is thin by contemporary-art standards, which means each new record sale carries outsized weight in setting expectations for the next. Buyers should also distinguish between his original paintings, which drive the auction records described above, and the limited-edition prints and canvases that make up the bulk of current gallery and publisher inventory.