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Harry Jackson was an American sculptor and painter whose career included work as a Marine combat artist, an abstract expressionist painter, a realist painter, and a sculptor specializing in Western images.

Though he was best known as the pre-eminent Western artist of his generation, Jackson's wide-ranging career defied category.

Jackson left his Chicago home at 14 for Wyoming, where he found work as a ranch hand. It was the start of a lifelong attachment to the region that would lead the New York Times to describe Jackson in a 2011 obituary as the "artist who captured the West."

He enlisted in the Marines at 18 and was a World War II sketch artist during some of the bloodiest fighting in the Pacific. He was wounded in battles at Tarawa and Saipan, earning two Purple Hearts and suffering a traumatic brain injury that would result in seizures and mood disorders for the rest of his life. ' Jackson was acclaimed as one of the great mid-century abstract expressionists, with LIFE Magazine in 1956 devoting eight pages to a profile that hailed him as an "American painter of surging talent and ambition."

Clement Greenberg, the foremost art critic of the modernist era and principal champion of abstract expressionism, said Harry Jackson delivered "the best first show since Jackson Pollock's." In fact, Pollock was born in Cody, and Harry Jackson moved to the East Coast in 1947 where he sought out the pioneering painter to work with him, developing a close bond that would last until Pollock's death in 1956.

Despite critical accolades and surging interest in—and market demand for—his work, Jackson turned his back on the New York modern art scene, and rededicated himself to mastering realism. Jackson went to Europe in 1954 to study the work of the Renaissance masters, and strove to incorporate modernist perspectives into a more classical approach. That duality of purpose would remain a driving force for the rest of his life, and define his approach to a career that sets Jackson apart from any other artist of his era.

Jackson was an iconoclast who repeatedly chose his own path, often defying critics and advisors, but always staying true to his own vision. Fiercely loyal to his friends, Jackson often painted or sculpted others he considered to be fellow mavericks. That includes musician Bob Dylan, who sat for a portrait around the same time, in the mid 1960s, when the famed acoustic folk musician shocked the world by switching to electric guitar.

Jackson's close friendship with actor John Wayne spanned several years, and in 1969 he created "The Marshal," a sculpture for the cover of Time magazine of Wayne as Rooster Cogburn from the film "True Grit." Presidents Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson all admired and displayed Jackson's work, and gave his sculptures as gifts to foreign leaders.

Jackson was one of the first outsiders to move into Little Italy in New York after the war, and captured a powerful scene of immigrants in “The Italian Bar.” The large format realist painting captures moments of everyday life and neighborhood routine at The Mulberry Street Bar in Little Italy.

Time magazine art critic Gene Thornton said "The Italian Bar" served as "a reminder that serious figurative art was still possible in our time, and as an example of how it could be done."

Thornton in 1981 called Jackson "one of the best-loved and most popular of living American artists" and "a figure of considerable historical importance."

John Giarrizzo, artist and associate professor of art at Northwest College in Powell, Wyo., said "'The Italian Bar' is one of the most important portrait paintings in American 20th century art.”

"Harry Jackson is the consummate American master," Giarrizzo said.