The first comprehensive biography of the work and life of Marjorie Reed is scheduled for release in 2008.  Click Here for more information.

Marjorie Reed is best known for her paintings of the stage stations and scenes along the Butterfield Overland Stage Route.  Born in Springfield, Illinois in 1915, her family moved to the Los Angeles area when she was eleven. There her father, Walter Reed, started Mission Engraving, a commercial art firm. 

According to Ed Ainsworth in "The Cowboy and Art", young Marjorie's inner urge to draw horses was so strong that she would sometimes walk up to eighteen miles just to sit on a corral fence and sketch the horses in action. Reed also claimed that in her early teens she would disappear for several days at a time in the San Gabriel Mountains to sketch deer and other wildlife.  "I didn't need much to get by.  Just a couple apples and a fig." Obviously such episodes caused her parents much worry and aggrevation. Yet this inner drive combined with her father’s tutelage and her mother’s love of art to help Marjorie develop her talent at a young age. 

Working in her father's firm by the age of twelve, she designed Christmas cards and other commercial art work for several major companies including Disney Studios, Standard Oil, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber. However she quit not long afterwards, commenting in later years that she could never adjust to the regimentation required for graphic art work.

After graduating from Glendale High School she attended Chouinard Art School and the Art Center school in Los Angeles.  Yet she credited her most important formal training to well known California landscape artist Jack Wilkenson Smith. Smith tutored her for almost two years after her graduation from high school. In addition to providing her with artistic guidance, Marjorie also credited Smith with encouraging her to roam the California countryside for inspiration. 

During one of her trips she came in contact with Captain William Banning. Banning had been an actual stage coach driver for his father Phineas Banning, the “Father of Los Angeles Harbor” and the owner of Southern California shipping empire. Immediately captivated by Banning’s knowledge of stage coaches and horse teams, Banning’s influence eventually led Marjorie to embark on a project that to this day best defines her work.  Tracing the Butterfield Overland stage route through California, she created a series of twenty paintings, each one a representation of the various stage stations or other well known locations along the routes.  For authenticity and to help realistically capture the essence of the route, Reed camped out at every stage station she painted.  When the series was finished in 1958 the entire collection of twenty paintings was purchased by James S. Copley, owner and publisher of the San Diego Union Tribune.   

The success of this project led to a series of subsequent projects which traced the Butterfield route from California eastward all the way to it’s origin in Tipton, Missouri.   She completed a series of paintings for every state along the way: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and finally Missouri.  The result was a series of paintings that at the time captured national attention for it’s historical as well as artistic aspects. 

Reed’s early start allowed her make her living as an artist for over 65 years. As a result she left behind a very large body of work which consists primarily of Western themes. Although she is best known for her Butterfield  paintings, her subject matter was known to range from placid paintings of burros (which she raised most of her life) to conquistadors  to cowboys on bucking broncs to Western landscapes.  In the 1940’s she painted “quite a lot of canyon scenes” as well as a many stage scenes under the pseudonym of Harvey Day.  Day was here husband at the time who had a job in the Grand Canyon area.

It was not unheard of at the time for women artists to paint using men’s names for commercial purposes.  Yet Reed claimed in a 1995 letter that she instead used her husband’s name because at the time there was so much demand for her work that “perhaps I could get a little break from a too busy life”.  

In the 1970’s Valley Bank in Arizona commissioned her to do a series of paintings on the Trading Posts of Arizona.  Seven of the paintings still hang today of the Bank One in Tucson.  Not long afterwards a private collector commissioned her to do a series of nine paintings with Hopi scenes in the Three Mesas area.   In addition to the original Butterfield paintings she did hundreds more of both Butterfield and other stage scenes. 

Reed claimed to have moved over eighty times in her life, spending most of her years in Arizona and Southern California. Her longest stay in one place was spent in the Tombstone area where she used to own and operate the Adobe Gallery in the 1980’s and early 90's.  Located in an original 1880's adobe building, the gallery had no running water or electricity. Marjorie was known to paint after dark by candlelight with a mesquite fire roaring in the fireplace. On Sunday nights she would teach art classes for elementary school kids at the gallery.

 Throughout her later life she was deeply religious in nature. Reed claimed in a letter to a friend once that she “never painted anything.  I just held the brush and God did the work.”  She also felt her art was inspired partly as a result of the frustration she felt in being denied a ranching life.  The pleasure experienced by those who enjoyed her work then alleviated this frustration, a frustration she claimed could only be alleviated “by returning the gift of the Creator.” 

Reed died while raking leaves a few days after Thanksgiving in 1996 at the old Campbell Ranch in Vallecito, California.  Fittingly enough, Vallecito was a master station on the Butterfield Route and was a location which she painted several times. Not far from Vallecito is La Casa Del Zorro resort in Borrego Springs, where many of the original Butterfield California paintings purchased by the Copley family still hang today. The appeal endures to this day as the value of her work has steadily risen in the  years since her death.