Thought by many art critics to be California’s greatest painter, Grace Carpenter Hudson was born near Ukiah in Potter Valley, California. The daughter of a newspaperman-photographer, she studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco and was a pupil of Virgil Williams at a time when San Francisco was an important art center. She returned to Ukiah, one hundred miles north along the “Redwood Highway” to teach painting. During this time she also became an illustrator for Sunset, Cosmopolitan, and Western Field.

In 1890 she married John Hudson who was a Pacific Coast ethnologist for the Field Museum and a researcher on the language and art of the Pomo Indians. Immersed in their culture, Hudson began to specialize in painting the Indian children she spent so much time with. These are the works she later became so famous for even though she did travel and paint extensively throughout Europe and Hawaii.

In 1904 she was commissioned by the Field Museum to paint portraits of the Pawnee Indians, with a special series of the Indian chiefs of Oklahoma. She returned to Ukiah where she lived and painted actively until her death at the age of seventy-two.

After a childhood in Spain, Hulings studied drawing and anatomy under Sigismund Ivanowsky and then with Bridgman at the Art Students League in New York. He left the art world to obtain a degree in physics from Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Ill health required that he move to the dryer climate in the West, so he relocated to Santa Fe where the strong local art community inspired him to return to his painting. In 1946 he had regained his health and moved to Louisiana where he became known for his portraiture. He also worked there as a freelance illustrator before moving back to Santa Fe in 1957 where he lives today and continues to work on his landscapes, portraits, and illustrations.

Charles Humphriss, born in England in 1867, specialized in sculpting the West. He settled in New York and eventually won the admiration and respect of his peers. He became a member of the National Sculptor Society and the Society of Independent Artists. Although he lived in New York and exhibited in the East, his imagination was sparked by trips to the West.

Humphriss primarily depicted the worship rituals of the American Indian. To him portraying the peaceful and spiritual nature of the Indian character was more truthful. He did not see the Indian as a warrior and chose rather to sculpt them in poses showing their need for the Great Spirit’s guidance and deliverance.

His work was exhibited at the New York Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and in San Francisco, where he won an award at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. He died at 65 in New York.

Frank Tenney Johnson was born on a ranch near Council Bluffs on the Missouri River. At the age of fourteen he ran away from home to apprentice himself to the panoramic painter F.W. Heinie in Milwaukee.

Johnson later studied under the tutelage of the former Texas ranger Richard Lorenz. He began his art career painting portraits and as a staff member of the Milwaukee newspaper. In 1902 he left for New York City to study at the famed Art Students League with Henri, Chase, Kenneth Hayes Miller and Mora. During that time he worked as a fashion and newspaper artist.

In 1904, Johnson spent the summer on a ranch in Hayden, Colorado, observing cowboy life and working as a highly successful illustrator of the Zane Grey books of the West. In 1920 he followed his friend Clyde Forsyth to Alhambra, California where they shared a studio together. This studio became a meeting place for many of the leading Western artists of the day including C.M. Russell, Edward Borein, Norman Rockwell and Dean Cornwell. Johnson’s “moonlight” technique of painting Western scenes was nationally famous when he died at the height of his career. It is said that he died from spinal meningitis probably contracted from a kiss.

William Keith was born in Aberdeen, Scotland on November 21, 1838. In 1850 Keith immigrated with his family to New York where, as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a wood engraver. He is believed to have come to San Francisco for two months in 1858 as an employee of Harper Brothers publishers. Following this assignment, he visited Scotland and worked in England for the London Daily News. Having saved enough money, he returned to San Francisco in 1859 and opted to remain. He went to work in the engraving shop of Harrison Eastman and later established his own engraving business with Durbin Van Vleck at 611 Clay Street.

Keith first became interested in painting in 1863 and began studying with Samuel Brookes. The following year he married artist Elizabeth Emerson and, under her tutelage, began painting in watercolor. In 1868 he gave up engraving to devote all of his time to painting. The following year the Keiths were in Dusseldorf, where he studied with Flamm and Achenbach. After visiting the galleries and museums of Dresden and Paris, they returned to the United States and had a studio in Boston which they shared with artist William Hahn.

Upon returning to San Francisco in 1872, Keith met naturalist John Muir who took him into the most remote parts of Yosemite, taught him the names of the trees and plants, and thoroughly acquainted him with nature’s wonders. Becoming an avid nature lover, there was “scarcely a mountain in three-fourths of California where he had not kept vigil for days at a time, studying every detail of color, flower, rock, forge, shadow and sunshine.” Keith became Thomas Hill’s rival in monumental landscapes. When George Inness visited California in 1890, he worked in Keith’s studio for many weeks. They made sketching trips together. The result for Keith was an influenced style reflecting the subjective rather than the spectacular. His “Majesty of the Oaks” sold at auction in New York City in 1903 for $2,300 about the same time “Glory of the Heavens” sold in San Francisco for $12,000. Keith commuted daily by ferry to his San Francisco studio and many of his later works are pastoral landscapes of Berkeley with oak trees, cows and ponds that he sketched en route. He painted nearly $4,000 oil paintings of which 2,000 burned in the 1906 earthquake and fire in San Francisco.

Keith has been called “Dean of California Artists” and “California’s Old Master. Ina Coolbrith wrote of his work, “Here nature’s heart throbs through the solitudes! Here nature’s soul looks from the mystic height.” His works are held by the Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Kahn collection just to name a few.

W.H.D. Koerner was brought to Clinton, Iowa in 1880 from his birthplace of Lun, Germany. By 1896 he was a staff artist at the Chicago Tribune earning $5.00 a day. Following attendance at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Francis Smith Art Academy he was art editor of a literary magazine in Battle Creek, Michigan. From 1905-1907 he studied at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1907 he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, working as an illustrator under the tutelage of Howard Pyle until 1911, along with N.C. Wyeth and Harvey Dunn. By the 1920’s he was one of the best known magazine and book illustrators. His study with Frank Breckenridge had provided the use of “broken color” and “commercial impressionism.” With these two assets his palette became full and vibrant.

In 1922 Koerner was given the commission to illustrate Emerson Hough’s The Covered Wagon, published serially by the Saturday Evening Post. By 1924 he was spending his summers in a log cabin near the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana. He also visited California and the Southwest. Koerner became truly the “illustrator of the eastern myth, of symbols of an earlier, less complicated, infinitely more moral land of ample time and room to roam.”

He received $1,000.00 for cover illustration for the Post, an extraordinary sum for the time. His painting garb was a smock over his knickers and golf socks with saddle shoes. After his death, hundreds of painting were in his studio, along with drawings, sketchbooks, and artifacts. His widow kept the studio intact until 1962, when exhibitions demonstrated that Koerner had been an important Western painter. The studio is now displayed intact at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center’s Whitney Museum of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming.

William R. Leigh, born in 1866 in Berkeley County, West Virginia, began his formal study of art at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, at the age of fourteen. After three years at the Institute, he went to Munich, Germany, where he studied at the Royal Academy for twelve years, and took the annual medal six times in succession. He also assisted in the painting of six cycloramas. Commemorating the 6th anniversary of the one in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, he received an illuminated parchment citation in 1953.

In 1906, at the age of forty, after ten years in the United States as an illustrator for leading magazines, he headed for the Southwest for the study of Indians, cowboys and animals. Under the inspiration of repeated trips to Arizona, New Mexico, as well as the Dakotas, Wyoming and other northern Rocky Mountain states, he produced many pictures owned by important collectors all over the United States and in foreign countries, including the Duke of Windsor and the late King Albert of the Belgians.

Mr. Leigh accompanied Carl Akeley to Africa in 1926 and the Carlisle-Clark expedition to Africa in 1928, each time as artist for the collection of material for the Akeley African hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From 1932 to 1935 he had charge of the painting of the background in the African Hall at the time of its construction. Some of his best known work is immortalized in this hall.

With other books and articles, Leigh is the author of THE WESTERN PONY, and FRONTIERS OF ENCHANTMENT.

Among his honors are: 1950-1951, Scroll Award, New York city Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1951, Citation, Kappa Pi National Art Fraternity, 1953, Benjamin West Clinedinst Memorial Medal for outstanding achievement in fine arts, 1954, first recipient of the newly created Alumni Honor Medal of Maryland Institute, Baltimore, as most outstanding graduate, 1954, Conservation Award of the National Life Conservation Society, as distinguished wildlife artist, and 1955, elected Academician, National Academy of Design.

The Leigh studio and related ephemera is installed at the Thomas Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma where over 500 paintings and 300 drawings are held. Other collections include: Woolaroc Museum in Oklahoma; Newark Museum; Heckscher Foundation; Department of External Affairs, Iveagh House, Dublin, Ireland; Huntington Museum, New York; the IBM Collection, and the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming.

Robert Lougheed, who came to be known as “the painter’s painter,” was born and raised on a farm in Ontario, Canada. At nineteen he was a mail order and newspaper illustrator for the Toronto Star, studying at night at the Ontario College of Art and then the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. At twenty-five he came to New York as the pupil of Frank Vincent DuMond and Dean Cornwell at the famed Art Students League. He continued working as an illustrator and his work appeared in magazines such as National Geographic, Sports Afield and Reader’s Digest for over thirty years.

He traveled widely throughout the West, particularly the old Bell Ranch country of New Mexico. In 1970 he was commissioned by the Post Office Department to design the six-cent buffalo stamp for the Wildlife Conservation Series. Books he illustrated are Mustang, with the paintings in the Cowboy Hall of Fame, and San Domingo. He was a multiple award winner at both the National Academy of Western Art and the Cowboy Artists of America.

Robert Lougheed was a quiet, forceful man, dedicated to painting. Relative to outdoor painting he said that “the best information is always in front of you” and he lived by this. Years of observation had taught him to work quickly and from nature whenever possible. His enthusiasm was boundless when natural phenomena were under discussion; a favorite comment was “Isn’t it wonderful?” Because of his early years on the farm and years of study devoted to animals and landscape, his knowledge was encyclopedic. This strong background coupled with a fine color sense continued to make him one of the most forceful painters of our time, a true artist’s artist. In his ability to select, he saw the best and the most telling of whatever was before him. When his rapid brush struck in sunlight on an adobe wall, it was better than the wall itself.

Robert Lougheed’s interest in art went far beyond his own easel. He was one of the prime movers in the founding of the National Academy of Art at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, and continued to serve as an advisor for many years. He also gave generously of his time as a teacher to many young painters who came to him. As a beneficiary of the legacy of Frank Vincent DuMond, Harold Von Schmidt, Sir Alfred Munning, Frederic Remington and a legion of others, Robert Lougheed felt obliged to help preserve their artistic traditions. He championed realism at a time when the mainstream of American art had lapsed increasingly into abstraction.

Moran immigrated to America from England with his family as a child. Though he received no formal art training, he was an apprentice to a wood engraver in Philadelphia during his teens. From his experience, he learned the skillful manipulation of texture and value (light and dark), evident in his works.

Moran became a western artist after working as an illustrator for magazines including Harper’s and Scribner’s. At the age of thirty-four, he was invited to accompany Ferdinand V. Hayden’s 1871 Geological Survey Expedition to “the Yellow Stone Territory.” Also traveling with the Hayden Expedition was pioneer photographer William Henry Jackson, with whom Moran forged a lifelong friendship and collaborated on many artistic projects. Moran’s paintings of Yellowstone’s geysers, hot springs canyons, and cliffs, combined with Jackson’s remarkable photos, played a major role in convincing Congress to make the region a national park in 1872.

After the Yellowstone trip, Moran’s career as an expedition artist and painter blossomed. He continued to travel with subsequent Hayden surveys, and painted Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon as well as other wilderness regions for the next forty years.

In all his works Moran strived to recreate nature colorfully, vibrantly, and idealistically, while at the same time evoking the viewer’s strong emotional response. He used many media to achieve his artistic goals and created thousands of oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and chromolithographs during his long life.

Edgar Samuel Paxson was born in East Hamburgh, New York in 1852. After school he assisted his father in his business as a sign painter and decorator. Paxson was always fascinated by the frontier life and had a great longing to see the West, so in 1877 he pulled up his roots and moved to the Montana Territory. There he became employed on ranches, learning the tricks of surviving the range’s variable weather and occasional Indian conflicts. Through his rustic journey West, his ranch work, and his experiences as a scout in the Nez Perce war of 1877-1878, Paxson truly lived the “Wild West” that has been portrayed in literature, movies, and television throughout the last century. His experiences became the inspiration and the subjects for his work, from small sketches in his journal to monumental murals.

Paxson began by simply sketching, for which he had a natural talent. Without any academic training in the arts, he was able to capture the movement and characteristics of the Western Frontier. His subject matter typically ranges from Native Americans to historical battles, hunting scenes to early exploration. Paxson’s goal was to immortalize the Old West he knew so intimately. Because of the rapidly occurring changes in Montana, he felt the necessity to record the West before it became unrecognizable. His works are nostalgic, romantic, and sentimental yet hold historical importance within late 19th and early 20th century fine art.

“Custer’s Last Battle On The Little Big Horn” won Paxson immediate recognition. The painting measures six by ten feet and took him over seven years to complete. His works are held by the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Montana County Courthouse, Montana State Capitol building, the University of Montana and the Anschutz Collection.