Harold Von Schmidt Draws And Paints The Old West
(1972 - Northland Press)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (by Walt Reed) This 248-page book cannot be recommended for the art. You will only find 89 pages dominated by the art, though 67 of those are large reproductions of the drawings & paintings. The rest of the pages are chock-full of greytone reproductions (many times large . . .) of color works. Another book, THE WESTERN ART OF HAROLD VON SCHMIDT, does a far better job of collecting this type of the artist's works. If you are taken by his art, you may want to get this book anyway, as you will get roughly 20 'well-presented' pieces that are not collected in the better book. The real action in this book takes place in the text, which provides a solid, lengthy biography, mostly in the artists' own words. Also, Von Schmidt relates, at length, what is going on in most of the works gathered here and the lost Western dynamics that he worked to preserve in the renditions. Most of the pieces are captioned with title, medium, palate, where it appeared, what story was being illustrated and the current collection it resided in.

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