Ansel Adams was one of America's premiere landscape photographers. He is best known for his pictures of the Yosemite region. Ansel Adams loved Yosemite, visiting every year of his life from the age of 14 onwards. He felt Yosemite and the other great wilderness areas of the world had recouperative spiritual powers. His photographs were his way of communicating his beliefs in the healing power of nature to his audience. Ansel Adams was one of America's greatest spokesmen for conservation and the environment. Part of the mission of the The National Museum of Wildlife Art is to explore humanity's relationship with nature. Ansel Adams' work and career clearly speaks to this.

Carl Ethan Akeley was determined to raise taxidermy to the level of "high" art. Working at the American Museum of Natural History, he began to model clay maquettes to create accurate life-sized animal dioramas. In the process, he began to bring taxidermy to new heights. With the encouragement of financier J. P. Morgan and the famed sculptor Alexander Phimster Proctor, he cast the first of the little clay groups into bronze in 1913. That first work was Wounded Comrade, a cast of which is in the NMWA collection.

Akeley became a teacher of such important wildlife artists as sculptors James L. Clark, Robert Rockwell, and Louis Jonas. Although widely known, Akeley's work is not widely held because it is rare; he did not create many sculptures. Akeley died in 1926 on a wildlife expedition to the Congo.

Douglas Allen is known for his draftsmanship and the simplicity of his designs. As a young boy, he was keenly interested in the work of N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), who has been a major influence in his artistic development. In 1953, he enrolled in the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts where he studied wildlife illustration. Following a short period of time in the Army, Allen was selected to illustrate a series of big game animals of North America for Outdoor Life Magazine. The series was later turned into a book, Big Game Animals, which is now a collectors item. Douglas Allen is a member of the Salmagundi Club in New York City, an executive board member of the Society of Animal Artists, and a founder of Wildlife Artists, Inc.

Tony Angell was born on November 15, 1940, in Los Angeles, California. He grew up interested in watching and depicting wildlife in the San Fernando Valley area of Southern California. As a child, he kept and flew hawks and falcons that he also enjoyed drawing and painting. However, by the time Angell left Southern California to attend the University of Washington (where he had received an athletic scholarship), his home area had lost much of the wilderness that had engaged him as a child, and he decided never to return there to live.

A sculptor who uses stone as his medium, Angell was mentored by Francis Lee Jacques and Don Eckelberry and was influenced by Bruno Liljefors. Though Angell depicts mainly birds in his art, he seeks to make the public aware of the environment and its inhabitants through his work. He maintains studios at his home in Seattle and at an island retreat in Puget Sound. In addition to sculpting, he has written and illustrated several books on wildlife.

"The stone itself, by its shape, its color, the way it looks in different light at different times of day, offers hints of how it can be defined."

(Quote from: Todd Wilkinson, "Coaxing Magic from Stone," Wildlife Art, Nov./Dec. 1995: 40)

Audubon is perhaps the most renowned wildlife artist in America, universally acknowledged by both art and natural history museums. His first publication, The Birds of America, was a twelve-year enterprise that exponentially increased the knowledge of American ornithological and natural history when its publication was completed in 1838. Audubon immediately embarked on a companion project for mammals, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which consumed him between 1830 and his death in 1851. The folio edition was published in 1846; the quarto edition, with five additional plates, was published in 1854.

Of the approximately 150 paintings executed for this work, nearly half were completed by the artist's son, John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862). John James Audubon's love of wild places and his fascination of living things is memorialized by the National Audubon Society, along with several state Audubon Societies, which are organizations founded in Audubon's memory to preserve and protect the ecosystems and wildlife brought to life by his exceptional art.

John Woodhouse Audubon was the son of renowned ornithologist and wildlife artist John James Audubon. John Woodhouse devoted his entire career to continuing and supporting the work of his father. He assisted in the completion of original works and the execution and distribution of lithographs. After the completion of the Double Elephant Bird Portfolio, John James and John Woodhouse embarked on a similar venture, The Quadrapeds of North America, which set out to document America's mammalian inhabitants. By the late 1830s, John James Audubon showed signs of mental illness and could no longer continue painting with much accuracy. John Woodhouse continued the series, eventually completing at least half of the work.

Because of the difficulty of safely studying wild animals, both Audubons often sketched caged or dead animals, causing some of their renderings to appear primitive and sinister. Artists also used explorers' written accounts of their wildlife experiences and observations on the frontier to aid in the completion of the wildlife paintings. Although John Woodhouse Audubon's artistic career has been overshadowed by his father's success, his contribution to early wildlife documentation is significant.

Audubon's work is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Mill Grove Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.