Internationally celebrated watercolorist, Thomas Aquinas Daly's atmospheric landscapes and poetic still-lifes have been compared to the historic work of George Inness (1825-1894) and Jean Bapiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), but neither of these past masters dealt so unwaveringly with the subtleties of the sportsman's world. Daly was born in Albany, New York, and has lived through the state during his lifetime. As a child, he read Field and Stream and Outdoor Life, becoming interested in hunting and fishing. Between 1955 and 1959, he majored in graphic arts at the University of Buffalo and studied a range of art from Japanese prints to abstract expressionism. He then began a twenty-three year career with the Greater Buffalo Press as a lithographer and later as an art director. In 1979, he began a full-time career in painting.

Working from a studio in his barn loft in rural western New York, Daly has evolved a signature style of small watercolors, usually 10 x 14 inches or less, dealing with sporting subjects. He paints in a luminist style characterized by assymetry, optical effects, and formal compositions rather than a photorealistic style. While Daly offers an occasional limited edition etching, he does not publish limited edition prints as many artists do today. Because most of his originals go directly into private collections, viewing his work can be something of a challenge.

Geoffrey Dashwood was born in Hampshire, England. At the age of fifteen, he was given the opportunity to study fine art at Southampton College of Art, but he left school to pursue art on his own. In 1980, he discovered a preference for sculpture and went on to win awards such as "best sculpture" at the Society of Wildlife Artists and first prize at the Festival De La Art Animalier in France. His stylistic approach of modeling bold forms and abstracting the essence of the shape and character of the animal is evident in his bronze, Scarlet Ibis, cast at Pangolin Editions in Gloucestershire, England. He has exhibited his work in New York, Paris and Santa Fe and is represented in the permanent collections of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum as well as the NMWA.

In the eighteenth century, Gerard de Lairesse was the leading decorator in Holland. He studied art under Bertholet Flemnale in Liege and his father, Renier Lairesse. Lairesse decorated many palaces and homes in Amsterdam and The Hague with classical paintings of allegorical and religious subject matter. Lairesse also created many engravings of wildlife. In 1690, he went blind and devoted the rest of his life to art theory. Lairesse wrote and illustrated the Great Painting Book and the Foundation of Drawing. The National Museum of Wildlife Art's nine etchings of solitary animals were created for art students who did not have access to draw from live animals.

Lairesse's work is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the Rijksmusuem, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Tate Gallery, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Very little is known about the personal life of Jacques Henri E. DeSeve, though he is, perhaps, one of the most influential natural history artists of all time. Commissioned by the famous Georges-Louis Leclerec, Comte de Buffon to be the principal illustrator of his ambitious and monumental Natural History (or, in the original French, Histoire Naturelle, générale et particuliere, avec la description du Cabinet du Roi), during the 1740s, DeSeve created hundreds of animal images. DeSeve was more artist than naturalist, however, and many of his creatures now seem fantastical or a bit incorrect in their portrayal. An interesting feature of his designs is his inclusion of wildlife habitats; DeSeve did not merely depict animals, but rather placed his creatures in appropriate environmental scenes. His work was widely copied in the engravings of peers for later editions of Buffon's books. The Bison, in the collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, represents one such example of an engraving after DeSeve's original design.

In 1885, DeCamp was commissioned by the Northern Pacific Railroad to paint in Yellowstone National Park. He spent the next 50 years of his life in Helena, Montana, working as a draftsman and painting part time.

Eugene Delacroix was once described by his contemporary, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1876), as the ultimate romantic artist, a volcanic crater artistically concealed behind bouquets of flowers. As a leader of the Romantic Movement, distinguished by a love of nostalgia, mystery and drama, Delacroix expressed his social conscience in paintings that convey a deep concern for personal and political liberty. His first works to be accepted by the annual Paris Salon in 1822 and in 1824 were violent depictions of slaughter and doomed souls. The director of the Academy at that time suggested that Delacroix tone down the violent images in order to please the Academy. Because of his reluctance to dilute his compositions, Delacroix fell out of favor with the Academy. Ironically, during that time, he won countless commissions to decorate palatial buildings in Paris. He was awarded the Légion dé honneur in 1831.

In 1832, Delacroix was invited to join a diplomatic party traveling to Morocco via Spain and Algeria for a five-month journey. The intensely different color and light combined with the fascinating culture of northern Africa provided fresh and exotic subjects for his work. In those five months, he gathered extensive information and subjects from which he often drew for the remainder of his life. In 1857, Delacroix was elected to the Institute, also known as the Académie des Beaux-Arts, in Paris.

Gerald Curtis Delano began drawing at an early age. After the encouraging sale of a pen and ink drawing to Life Magazine, he attended evening classes at the Swaine Free School of Design in New Bedford. Delano moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League where he studied under George Bridgeman, Edward Dumond, and Edward Dufer. He also attended the Grand Central School of Art, taking classes with prominent illustrators Harvey Dunn, Dean Cornwell, and N.C. Wyeth. Delano illustrated numerous magazine covers, drew fashions for women’s magazines, and painted subjects for various calendar companies. He also became an animator of movie cartoons. His humorous sketches appeared in many U.S. and European magazines, including Life, Judge, Puck, and Punch. Beginning in 1919, Delano traveled numerous times to the west and, in the mid-twenties, he settled in New York to create illustrations for the covers of Cosmopolitan, Colliers, and Western Stories, as well as a Native American series for the Santa Fe Railway Company. In 1936, he was awarded a two-year contract to create illustrations with accompanying text for The Story of the West, a chronological account of events highlighting the development of the West from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Eventually, Delano left the illustration business to pursue painting. In 1947, Delano traveled to Arizona and visited the Navajo reservation. For the rest of Delano’s career, depictions of Navajo people, red sandstone canyons, and wildlife dominated his paintings.

Some of Delano’s Navajo paintings romanticize the subject while others show the artist’s identification with their values and culture. Unconcerned with detail and accuracy of form, Delano attempted to capture the spirit of the land and people. He purposely simplified his compositions and colors so the viewer could easily understand his message. In the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s Indian Village, three wolves lurk outside a distant grouping of teepees. Delano simplified his forms with a limited color palette and wide, thin brushstrokes, which show influences of cubism.

A multi-faceted artist best known for his depictions of Native Americans and wildlife, Edwin Willard Deming was born in Ashland, Ohio, in 1860. He received his training at the Art Students League and spent a year in Paris where he studied with Boulanger and Lefebvre. Deming had a long-standing relationship with Native Americans. As a child he played with Sac, Fox, and Winnebago Indian children in western Illinois. During Deming’s first trip to the American West in 1887, he visited the Apache and Pueblo Indians in the Southwest, and the Umatillas in Oregon. In 1893, Deming and fellow artist DeCost Smith spent time among the Sioux and Crow Indians to write and illustrate about life among these people for Outing magazine. On one of his infrequent trips to New York City, Deming married Therese Osterheld, who was also an artist. They raised their six children out West where the Blackfeet Indians adopted the family and gave Deming the name “Eight Bears.” Later, the family moved back to New York City where their home in Greenwich Village was called “The Lodge of the Eight Bears.” Deming collaborated with his wife to write and illustrate a series of children’s books, as well as illustrating a children’s book written by his daughter Alden. He died in New York City in 1942.

Born in the Flemish town of Hulst (located in the Netherlands today) around 1591, Paul De Vos belonged to a family of painters. His older brother, Cornelis De Vos, was famous for his portraits and history subjects, while his well-known brother-in-law, Frans Snyders, influenced De Vos' personal style and decision to paint mainly hunting scenes, still-life images, and animal subjects. De Vos began training in Snyders' studio sometime during the latter half of the first decade in the seventeenth century, and became a master in Antwerp’s significant Guild of Saint Luke in 1620.

De Vos never signed his work, so it is extremely difficult to build a chronology of his development as a painter. However, he was known to have regularly completed commissions for King Philip IV of Spain. His style was similar to Snyders’s, but De Vos’s color palette tended to be warmer, his brushwork looser, and he painted subjects, such as fighting cats, that Snyders never approached.

Though much remains mystery about De Vos’s personal life, it seems he may have counted the painter Peter Paul Rubens among his friends, as records show that Rubens was the godfather to one of De Vos’s ten children. De Vos collaborated not only with Rubens but also with Anthony van Dyck.

William Hunt Diederich grew up and attended school in Switzerland but moved to Boston at age fifteen for more schooling. He then traveled to the Southwest and spent time in Wyoming working on a ranch. After moving back east, Diederich attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and took trips to both Europe and Africa. The artist continually moved around the world for the rest of his life between the United States, Germany, and Mexico.

Working in the Art Deco Style, Diederich created freestanding sculptures as well as functional items, such as gates, light fixtures, candelabras, etc. His decorative ironwork appears as silhouettes of graceful animals and curling foliage. Although horses and dogs make up a major part of his opus, Diederich also depicted the wildlife he had seen on trips to the American West and Africa. In the later part of his life, the artist's politics tempered interest in his work as he took an active pro-German stance during both world wars, and he became even more eccentric in his old age. However, the quality of craftsmanship and his elegant designs reveal Diederich to be one of the eminent Art Deco artists of the early twentieth century.

Born in Fresno, California, Maynard Dixon drew constantly as a child, documenting the new settlers, trappers, cattlemen and expansive landscape of the area. At the age of sixteen, he sent two of his sketchbooks to artist Frederic Remington who replied with encouragement, marking the beginning of Dixon’s career. After three months at the California School of Design in San Francisco, Dixon abandoned formal art training and traveled throughout the West, capturing the landscape and the people in his illustrations and poetry. By 1895, his illustrations appeared in leading magazines and newspapers. In the late 1890’s, Charles Lummis, editor of the Los Angeles magazine, Land of Sunshine, published Dixon’s illustrations and verse and encouraged him to visit the Southwest to find further inspiration for his art.

In 1906, an earthquake and fire destroyed Dixon’s studio, and like many other San Francisco writers and artists, he moved to New York City. During an era considered the “golden age of illustration,” Dixon illustrated Western adventure stories in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, Scribner’s and McClure’s, and Western novels including Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy stories. Despite his success in New York, Dixon felt forced to present a commercialized image of the West, and in 1912 returned to San Francisco to work on easel and mural painting. During the 1920’s, Dixon traveled with his second wife, depression era photographer Dorothea Lange, through Nevada and Arizona, over wild horse ranges, deserts, and Hopi and Navajo country.

Throughout his life, Dixon made solitary excursions through the plains, mesas, and deserts of the West - drawing, painting, writing, and pursuing an authentic awareness of the region’s spirit. He resisted current art trends and remained committed to his unique and honest vision of the West. “I must find in this visible world the forms, the colors, the relationships that for me are the most true of it,” the artist stated, “and find a way to state them clearly so that the painting may pass on something of my vision.” (Unpublished letter in the Maynard Dixon Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1945) After suffering from emphysema for years, Maynard Dixon died in Arizona in 1946.

William Herbert Dunton was born on August 28, 1878 in Augusta, Maine. He grew up drawing and spending time outdoors with his grandfather, and at the age of sixteen, quit school to be a full-time illustrator; he'd had wildlife illustrations published in local Maine newspapers as well as in the Boston Globe by the age of twelve, and by fourteen, Dunton was writing and illustrating his own column in the sportsman's magazine Recreation. Dunton would use his illustration jobs as a way to finance his summer trips to the Western United States.

Mostly self-taught, he took classes at Cowles Art School in Boston and at the Art Students League in New York where he was instructed by Joseph De Camp and Ernest Blumenschein. It was Blumenschein who invited Dunton to Taos, New Mexico. In 1912, Dunton established a studio there and was one of the founding members of the Taos Society of Artists. Dunton did illustration work for numerous magazines and books, including several Zane Grey covers. In addition to illustration work, Dunton also executed lithographs of animals.

Dunton married Nellie Hartley in Boston in 1900 and they had two children. In 1921, Dunton moved permanently to Taos, New Mexico. In 1922, he resigned as a member from the Taos Society of Artists, though he continued his involvement with the group. Dunton experienced success as an illustrator and painter known for his depictions of the 'old West,' which was fast disappearing as Eastern settlers moved in. He lamented the vanishing frontier and his paintings reflect the nostalgia for the forgotten hero and uncharted territory. A member of the Salmagundi Club, an artist organization in New York City, Dunton had many prestigious clients including John D. Rockefeller, Teddy Roosevelt, and Douglas Fairbanks. Sadly, Dunton was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1935 and died on March 18, 1936 in Taos, New Mexico.

Dunton's works are recognized in many museums and private collections, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Buffalo Bill Historical Society in Cody, Wyoming, the Museum of New Mexico, and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

One of the finest artists in western art history, Albrecht Durer was a leading painter and printmaker of the Northern Renaissance. More than any other artist, he was responsible for introducing Italian Renaissance perspective and composition to northern Europe, largely through the dissemination of his graphic work. His extensive body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, portraits and self-portraits, and engravings. While equally talented as a painter and draftsman, Durer the engraver was unrivalled in technical expertise. Through the emotional and intellectual depth of his works and originality of composition, he took printmaking to new heights.

Durer's exceptional graphic works far outnumber his surviving paintings. Adapted from Italian influences, Durer's subjects are religious in content. Nonetheless, Durer maintained his identity as a German artist, working within the native Gothic tradition of northern Europe characterized by increased naturalism of artistic subjects and style. During the Middle Ages, artists in Germany were classed as artisans. Durer was highly impressed with the elevated status enjoyed by Italian artists. Although he was highly respected in northern Europe, he lived in Italy for years at a time in order to work within the supportive artistic environment of southern Europe.