Olaf Wieghorst (1899-1988) was born in Viborg, Denmark and is known for his Western genre, Indian, cowboy and horse paintings. By the age of nine he was skilled in horseback acrobatics and performed as a stunt rider for the Danish Circus (Tivoli Theater in Copenhagen) and also throughout different parts of Europe. Olaf Wieghorst also worked on a farm where he regularly rode horses. He developed a love for horses and they were to become a major theme in his paintings during his career as an artist.
n 1924, Olaf Wieghorst married a Brooklyn girl named Mabel Walters. The couple and their son moved to the city of El Cajon, California in San Diego County in 1944. They were to live there for more than forty years. Olaf Wieghorst built a studio that he outfitted extensively with western memorabilia and he also maintained two horses that he kept for use as models and for riding. It was about this time that Olaf Wieghorst devoted all of his energies to painting. His love of horses and the west showed in his paintings and the common them of his better art work is comprised of Western genre, horses, cowboys and Native Americans. In fact his best works were done while he was in California when the primary subject matter of his paintings was horses and cowboys. Olaf Wieghorst also created a number of horse portraits and would study their personalities as part of creating the painting. Some of the more famous horses captured in the paintings of Olaf Wieghorst were Gene Autry’s Champion, Tom Morgan’s stallion and Roy Rogers’ Trigger.
