Frank Paul Sauerwein was born in 1871 and raised in Philadelphia, the pupil of his father, Charles D. Sauerwein, a portraitist and genre painter who studied in Europe. Frank Sauerwein first studied at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art, then at the Pennsylvania Academy, and finally at the Art Institute of Chicago. Sauerwein moved to Denver about 1891 because of ill health. In 1893 he began to sketch Indians in the Rockies. Within two years his subjects were mostly western landscapes and Indian life. He was in Colorado Springs in 1893, traveling with Charles Craig to the Ute Reservation. After a trip to France and Spain, he returned West, visiting Taos in 1899, Santa Cruz and Santa Fe in 1900, and Taos in 1902 and 1903. Next he resided in California for a brief time. Then in 1906 he moved to Taos where he purchased a house and lived for two years. Stricken by tuberculosis and too ill to paint, he went to Connecticut to find a cure. Sauerwein was an important painter in the West during his time. He painted both oils and watercolors and favored naturalistic, tightly drawn landscapes, which are at the same time atmospheric and even lyric. He was known as a competent, straightforward naturalistic recorder of the landscape and Indian life. Frank Sauerwein died a young man in his late thirties in 1910 in Stamford, Connecticut.