Once the South Dakota Historical Society Press earned the right to publish Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir as Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography, the staff and I began to look for an artist who could give new life to Wilder’s imagery and to the sweeping landscape of the Great Plains—hills, wildflowers, oceans of prairie, brilliant, unexpected colors. As we traveled around the region to conferences and book shows, we visited local art galleries, searching for just the right combination of artistic vision and prairie color palette. An exhibit of homestead art by Iowa artist Judy Thompson caught our eyes early on, but her Homestead Series featured hot oranges and burnt purples and browns. She was accurately portraying the unforgiving sun of the summer season and the harsh realities of homesteading, but it was not quite the look we wanted for Pioneer Girl. Then one day, I walked into an art gallery in Sioux Falls, and there was Thompson’s rich, gem-like portrayal of a sandhill crane she called Redhead. The bird’s vibrant but unusual pose and the painting’s crystal-clear blues and greens accented with red left no doubt in my mind that the artist would capture the complexity of the plains and Wilder’s joy in nature at any time of the year.
Judy Thompson, Redhead. Courtesy of Judy Thompson
I wasted no time in calling Thompson and inviting her to provide the art for the cover of Wilder’s memoir. At that time, the Press was only planning to publish one volume and so needed only one piece of art. I remember urging the artist to pick any season except summer and to avoid using orange. As she recalls it, I told her “NO ORANGE” in all caps. I meant it as a sort of shorthand that would ensure a cooler palette. And she understood me perfectly, for her work, Silver Lake Reflections, shows a contemplative Wilder on the prairie in a glorious Dakota springtime. (As you shall see, the artist would not take me seriously when it came to orange.) When we unveiled Silver Lake Reflections to the public prior to publication, a “hair controversy” ensued. The artist had shown Laura with her hair flowing loose, something that many fans considered inappropriate, but as Thompson pointed out, the young Laura Ingalls was wearing her hair in exactly that same manner in the only professional photograph taken in her youth. The artist had chosen the image well, for the cover and the book made a huge hit among readers.
One of Thompson’s preliminary sketches for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives. Courtesy of Judy Thompson
Shortly before Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography appeared, the South Dakota Historical Society Press decided to do an anthology of articles about Wilder’s legacy plus two more books based on Wilder’s manuscripts. We asked Thompson to provide cover art for all three additional volumes. Since she had featured spring on the first cover, I suggested that she render the other three seasons for the next books, rounding out the year just as Wilder had done in her seasonal memoir. The next book up was Pioneer Girl Perspectives: Exploring Laura Ingalls Wilder. For this cover, Thompson chose to depict the young Laura helping her father during the summer haying season. When Thompson submitted her first version, the work depicted Wilder with her back to the viewer in a brilliant orange dress that seemed to ignore my previous hints about color. I had to laugh—was she deliberately waving that orange flag in front of me? No, she assured me, she was not. All art needed some orange, she explained, and even the first cover had orange tones if one looked carefully. The staff, however, decided that the cover should show Wilder facing the viewer. Thompson adjusted the orange dress and the pose for the next version, which she titled Summer Fields.
The most panoramic of Thompson’s artwork for the Pioneer Girl Project is Dakota Twilight, which graced the cover of Pioneer Girl: The Revised Texts. It shows the four Ingalls girls walking along the Big Slough just after sunset on their way back to the homestead. Ducks fly up from the open water amid the pinks and violets of an autumn evening in Dakota Territory. The cover art helped the book win an award for best design from the Association of University Presses in 2021. In the final piece of artwork for the Pioneer Girl series, Thompson moved out of Dakota Territory to portray the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Pioneer Girl: The Path into Fiction presents all the extant manuscripts that lead directly from Wilder’s memoir to her first novel. On the cover, snow falls softly as Laura stands in front of a team of horses. This painting, Sugaring Time in the Big Woods, is probably my favorite of all of Thompson’s artwork. I have watched readers lovingly stroke the velvety looking book cover as they tell me how beautiful it is.
Judy Thompson. Courtesy of Judy Thompson
But the story does not quite end there. One summer before COVID, I attended a program that Thompson presented for an event in De Smet. Not only a talented artist, Thompson is also a delightful speaker who engages her audience with humor and the strength of her vision. I was surprised to find myself the target of one of her anecdotes. She recounted the story of how I had called her to illustrate the series and how successfully the first painting had gone. Then she showed the original rejected artwork for the cover of Pioneer Girl Perspectives and cheerily recalled my unreasonable aversion to orange. She had named the rejected painting First Cutting, which was a double entendre, alluding to both the subject of the work, the first cutting of hay, and the cutting of the painting itself from the Pioneer Girl series. As I smiled along with everyone else at my editorial foibles, I realized just how striking the painting was. I also recognized that it was her only Wilder-inspired work that existed outside the collection of the South Dakota Historical Society Press. I decided then and there to buy First Cutting for my own collection—for its beauty and as a reminder that as an editor I have clearly made mistakes.
―Nancy Tystad Koupal
To see more of Judy Thompson’s artwork, visit her website, https://www.judythompsonwatercolors.com/