Magnus Heurlin

One of Alaska’s earliest and longest-tenured resident painters, Rusty Heurlin was a keen observer of the lives of Native people and settlers in northern Alaska. He was born to Swedish parents and trained at the Fenway School of Illustration in Boston. The artist arrived in Valdez, Alaska in 1916. He left to serve in World War I, but returned to Alaska in 1924 for good.

Heurlin based his work on the accumulated experience of almost seventy years Alaskan residence. He spent, for instance, four whaling seasons at Barrow in the early days of Eskimo whaling in umiaks under sail — a favorite subject in later years. The artist is best known for several cycles of large paintings chronicling Alaska’s history, each of which illustrate major themes in the history of Alaska’s Native and pioneer cultures. Other Heurlin paintings are more modest in scale, but are all the more effective for their quiet evocation of the lives of Eskimo hunters and pioneer Alaskans.