November 15, 2026
Here are a few of the notes I made for my talk at the Hermosa Inn tonight. This will be one of my last history talks and I want to make it a good one.
This photo was taken outside his adobe home, which he designed and built, in Cave Creek, Arizona. That is the Seven Sisters range over his left shoulder. And, here are the same Seven Sisters, as seen out my back door.
Yes, the Lon Megargee adobe home is still here, perhaps a mile, or two, south of me, just off the dog leg at Spur Cross Road. I have been going past it on my way into town, and back, for the past forty years, and counting. I invariably give my regards to Lon each and every time I pass. Here is a better shot of the painting Lon is holding, in the above photo:
"Margarita" also known as "Fiesta"
1951
It's easy to see why his artwork was labeled as "lusty," "crass," and "style-less" (see the Ed Mell quote, below). The nude cowgirl in Cowboy's Dream doubles down on that point. This was in the same period when he created four classic paintings for the A-1 Beer Co. in Phoenix, with the first one being "Cowboy's Dream." He painted four different versions of it. This is the best and most well known.
"Cowboy's Dream" by Lon MegargeeAnd here is a reference photo he took outside the same Cave Creek house and I believe that is Black Mountain in the background. It's unclear if that is Lon posing as the cowboy, but he did have photos of himself taken in various garb for his paintings.
(and it's also interesting that he included an empty liquor bottle which is not in any of the finished paintings)
So, it's easy to see why art critics labeled his brand of painting, "Lusty stories depicting Western life," and, of course, they were not wrong. In fact, most "Cowboy Artists" do a G-rated version of the drover's life, but Lon leaned on the bad boy aspect, which I love him for.
The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Of course, to most of us, Lon Megargee is an Arizona treasure and his multi-faceted life and career deserves all the love we can send him. That's not to say, he was a saint. No, he was, to put it mildly, a bit of a complicated dude. For one thing he was married seven or eight times! A couple of the marriages are murky and hard to confirm, but I think it's safe to say he was a serious, serial monogamist. And as one of his biographers put it, "His relationship with women brought unhappiness to all parties."
Other points to ponder:
• Some Lon fans like to point out that he was "self-taught" but that is ridiculous. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the LA School of Art And Design.
• He changed the spelling of his last name (adding an extra e at the end) allegedly to glom on to a storied family's legacy.
• Lon once gave Santa Fe demonym Mabel Dodge Luhan "a bad case of the nerves" when he insisted on dancing with her when he had a knife stuck in his boot top.
• A friend once remarked, "Lon Megargee was exactly what an Easterner thought a Westerner should be."
• Lon's darker side "can be read as a remarkable pattern of lies, evasions and poses. It seems unnecessary now, but the truth was never enough."
• In addition to his cowboying, he wrote songs, worked as a fireman, a night watchman, a stud poker dealer and an exhibition roper with Arizona Charlie's Wild West Show. Oh, and he built eight houses, all of them in the Santa Fe style and one of them became the Hermosa Inn where I am speaking tonight.
"[Lon's]wildly varied output and his refusal to settle on a signature approach, have made it difficult for the art world to access his importance."
—Ed Mell
Of course, my friend and studio mate, the late, great Edmundo Segundo, owned two Lon Megargee pieces of art, perhaps the very best of them all. Here they are for your viewing pleasure.
circa 1910
Busted
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