I first got to know Ace Powell, the famous western artist when he got a commission from Havre Federal Savings and Loan to paint three paintings about the prairies around Havre.
He came to Havre and my uncle Al took Ace around to sketch scenes that might be used in the paintings. I would see Ace every morning at the Lou Lucke Company where he would be sitting in the so called “President’s Chair”. He would have a dozen little note cards with him and would always be drawing a bear or a teepee or a cabin or an Indian on a horse or something. When finished he would toss them aside and I would pick them up and still have them to this day.
My aunt Jan Lucke was learning to use water colors then so one day Ace had Al take him out to our school house cabin on Clear Creek and he did a water color of the building noting what color mixtures he used. To the three sided outhouse that was like sitting in a recliner chair, he painted that in too and called it a “character note”. That painting was stolen right off a wall in the Lou Lucke Company, never to be seen again.
The next summer I drove over to Apgar on vacation with my parents and we stopped at Ace Powell’s studio in Hungry Horse. It was that trip that he took me to see Charlie Russell’s cabin on the shore of Lake McDonald and I have been in awe ever since.
Ace had a small Franklin stove in his studio. A Franklin stove, invented by Benjamin Franklin was a free standing fireplace. I said to Ace that I had never seen anything like that before.
I had not been home long before I got a letter from Ace saying that if I would send him fifty dollars he would send me the stove. I bought the stove and hauled it from cabin to cabin until at the Alkali Springs cabin it went perfectly in a small den that held stairs going to the second floor. When I sold that cabin the Franklin went with it.
I have owned only two Powell paintings in my life and lots of note cards and a couple of bronzes. Unfortunately one time when times were bad, I had to sell the two paintings and I learned never to count on the sale of art to bring what it ought to.
That changed too. One time I had a large and ugly picture. It was an awful painting. I learned that the painter had a big name in some circles and had a representative in the Flathead. I took the painting to her and walked out of her office with a check for a thousand dollars for a painting that I would not have given five bucks for.
Go figure!
