Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton (original) (raw)

Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton

May 23 - May 8, 2011

On the wintry plains of northern New Mexico in 1893, a man hired to destroy wolves looked into the eyes of the animal he had lured toward death. In that moment, Ernest Thompson Seton changed -- from a wolf killer to a champion of conservation. (right: Ernest Thompson Seton, ca. 1910. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress)

Seton went on to earn international acclaim for his artwork and writing, and became one of the founders of today's Boy Scouts. Though often regarded in the same the breath with Audubon and Burroughs, he remains largely unknown today.

The New Mexico History Museum changed that with Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Son, an exhibit featuring more than 30 original paintings and drawings by Seton, books, personal memorabilia, photographs and rare audiotapes. The exhibit serves as a companion to a book by David L. Witt, Ernest Thompson Seton: The Life and Legacy of an Artist and Conservationist (Gibbs Smith, 2010).

"Seton is a godfather to today's environmental movement, as important to the early development of wildlife conservation as John Muir is to wilderness preservation," said Witt, who also served as guest curator of the exhibit and is director of the Seton Legacy Project at the Academy for the Love of Learning in Santa Fe. "His contributions to the environmental movement and to science, literature, art and youth education have enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of boys, girls and their families for more than a century."

Born in England in 1860, Seton moved to Canada with his family when he was six, and eventually settled in the United States as an adult. As a young man, he immersed himself in the study of the natural world.

In 1893, he was sent to Clayton, N.M., to rid the L Cross F Ranch of marauding wolves. After a brutal encounter with a wolf named"Lobo," Seton wrote "The King of Currumpaw, A Wolf Story," published to worldwide acclaim in_Scribner's Magazine_ the following year. Through that story, Seton invented the genre of the realistic animal story, portraying animals as they actually live in the wild and changing forever the way Americans looked at nature. (left: At the entrance to the exhibit Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton, visitors are introduced to the feared, onetime hunter of northern New Mexico nights: canis lupus, the wolf. Photo by Blair Clark, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs)

In 1902, Seton founded an outdoor youth-education program known as "Woodcraft"; in 1910, he co-founded the Boy Scouts of America.

A technically accomplished wildlife illustrator, Seton developed concepts for bird identification that influenced the field guides of Roger Tory Peterson and others. He wrote some 40 books and more than 1,000 magazine articles and short stories, and drew or painted some 6,000 works of art. His book Wild Animals I Have Known has been continuously in print since it was first published in 1898. (Rudyard Kipling once wrote to Seton that the book inspired him to write the Jungle Books.) (right: David L. Witt, curator of Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton. Photo courtesy of David L. Witt.)

Much of Seton's understanding of nature came not from Western science, but from his extensive studies with First Nations peoples in Canada. Seton was a vocal supporter of Native people's political rights and a passionate advocate for the study of their culture, ethics and history.

In 1930, Seton moved to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Santa Fe, founding the Seton Village neighborhood, where he lived until his death in 1946. He designed and lived in Seton Castle -- a preposterous structure on what Seton called "the last rampart of the Rockies." The castle was destroyed by fire in 2005, but the echoes of Seton's legacy can still be heard around campfires and in a distant wolf's howl.

The New Mexico History Museum features more than 500 years of stories that made the American West. The Museum is located at 113 Lincoln Ave., in Santa Fe. Please contact the Museum for hours and fees.

Editor's note: The New Mexico History Museum provided source material to Resource Library for this article and catalogue text. If you have questions or comments regarding the source material, please contact the New Mexico History Museum directly through either this phone number or web address:

505-476-5200

http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/

Additional Images

To view additional images please click here.

Resource Library readers may also enjoy:

Digitized Works by Seton from etsetoninstitute.org
Wild animals I have known: and 200 drawings, by Ernest Thompson Seton, 359 pages, published by Grosset & Dunlap, 1898, original from Harvard University, digitized Oct 24, 2007, from Google Books
Wildlife Art: 18-19th Century, 19-20th Century,20-21st Century

Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.