John Fabion, born in Austria in 1905, immigrated to the United States in 1912 and became a naturalized citizen in 1922. He studied art abroad at The Royal Academy of Florence, The Arts and Crafts School (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Vienna and the National Academy of Krakow in Poland; he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1934. Following World War II, Fabion returned to his Chicago alma mater to assume a professorial role where he continued to teach until 1970.

Although Fabion was a world-recognized artist who had taken many honors and prizes at the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, he is best remembered for the work he produced while a combat artist with the United States Marine Corps during World War II. In addition, Fabion had previously worked as a WPA artist for about five years, and went to Vietnam in 1968 as a civilian combat artist for the Marine Corps. He was decorated for his military service with a Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

The bronze Bison was produced in 1935, a year after Fabion finished his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. Highly stylized, the animal is shown in a reclining pose.

Growing up as an avid hunter and horseback rider, Sally James Farnham became fascinated by the anatomy of horses. Her interest in sculpture began as a purely aesthetic one, increasing as she accompanied her father on trips to various museums in Europe, admiring the works on display.

Her career as a sculptor began in 1901, when her husband, Paulding Farnham, a painter and designer for Tiffany's, supplied her with some plasticine to help her pass the hours while recovering from an illness in the hospital. Sally derived great pleasure from her first attempt at sculpting, from which she produced a Spanish dancer. She dedicated herself to the art once she had recuperated.

Farnham received no formal training but welcomed the encouragement, advice, and criticism of artists Frederic Remington and Henry Shrady. She grew to become an incredibly versatile and highly sought after artist, completing portrait busts, equestrian statues, and bas reliefs. She received commissions from U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Harding, and Hoover. She completed a life size equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar for the Venezuelan Government. Very impressed with her work, Venezuela awarded her the decoration of the Order of the Bust of Bolivar, a rare accomplishment for a woman at the time. Around 1905, Farnham took a trip to a ranch in British Columbia and after that she sculpted her first western works, focusing on cowboys in various poses.

The National Museum of Wildlife Art owns one bronze sculpture by Farnham, Courtship, Two Elephants. This piece displays Farnham's mastery of the art and her ability to accurately sculpt wildlife along with her other specialties.

Olive Fell grew up in Wyoming, and after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, she returned to her home state. She settled on the Four Bear Ranch near Cody and lived there for the rest of her life. In the 1930s, Fell developed her popular "Little Bear Cubs" design on cards and novelties, which sold to tourists in the national parks and resorts. During the 1940s and 50s, she continued to create postcards and posters for Yellowstone National Park. In 1935, the artist began painting Native American children with oils and later acrylics. She also sculpted wildlife in wood, rock, and stone.

Despite her isolation from the artistic community, Fell became known especially for her etchings. For Minds to Know was chosen as one of the one hundred best prints of the year by the Society of American Etchers in 1934. During the 1930s, several of her prints were featured in exhibitions sponsored by organizations such as the International Etchers, the Northwest Printmakers, and the Society of American Etchers. She also showed at the National Art Exhibition in Chicago in 1936 and the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939.

As early as the 1930s, the Buffalo Bill Museum (now the Buffalo Bill Historical Center) began showing Fell's prints as she regularly loaned them her work. The Buffalo Bill Historical Center as well as the Montana Historical Society in Helena continue to collect her work.

"The inspiration for most of Fell's work came from within the boundaries of her 1,800-acre ranch, a protected game refuge in the Absaroka Range of the Wyoming Rockies. Regularly she tracked animals on horseback or on skis, then sat for hours, often using precarious vantage points to observe and sketch for future reference."

(Source: Kovinick, Phil and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick. An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.)

Born in 1954, John Felsing is a native to Michigan. He grew up drawing and painting in Battle Creek and studied zoology at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Following his school years, Felsing worked illustrating the publications of the Battle Creek area's Binder Park Zoo, winning several awards and national recognition for his designs. His career as an illustrator led him also to a position as staff artist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources' magazine, Natural Resources. Felsing is now a full-time painter.

Preferring the oil medium, Felsing often chooses to take native Michigan birds in their natural habitats as his subjects, though he pursues "pure" landscape painting as well. His landscapes also focus on his own backyard, so to speak, as he produces views of rural Southern Michigan.

His works, Ghost in the Night and November are good examples of the artist's style, depicting birds in aquatic native Michigan landscapes. Felsing is known for painting at diverse times of day and throughout the changing seasons. Ghost in the Night is a nocturnal scene, while November shows a quiet autumn view of Canada geese by a stream. Both of these works express a fidelity to Felsing's thought about the power of painting related to nature. He says, "All that one can do with painting is attempt to release your emotional response to nature."

In 1886, John Fery immigrated to the United States and soon after made his first trips west. Briefly returning to Europe in 1890, he organized a hunting party to traverse the western regions of the U.S. in 1893 and 1895. Fery resided at Jackson Lake, Wyoming, in the late 1890s and struck by the beauty of the lake, painted the area at least thirty-five times. He is assumed to be self-taught as the records are unclear about his course of study. In 1903, he moved to Milwaukee and established his studio in a building with eleven other German artists, including George Peter, Robert Schade, and Franz Biberstein. In 1911, Fery moved to Minnesota, where the Great Northern Railroad commissioned him to create large paintings of the scenery en route to Glacier National Park, Montana. His paintings served as advertisements for travel through the northern regions and the Glacier National Park where the Great Northern operated the only hotel. In 1919, Fery moved to Salt Lake City and painted many landscapes, concentrating on Zion's Canyon. He eventually settled on Orcas Island, near Bellingham, Washington. In 1929, a fire burned down his cabin and all his possessions, including many of his paintings and sketches. After the death of his wife in 1930, he moved to Everett, Washington, where he died four years later.

For more than four decades, Fery devoted his life and talent to grand mountain vistas, although he is particularly known for his large paintings of Glacier National Park. His biggest patron, The Great Northern Railroad, purchased a total 362 paintings and at least 150 circulate in private collections. Roughly half of these paintings depict of the Rocky Mountains, while more than a dozen depict scenes of the Tetons and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Fery's mountainous landscapes often contained elk, horses, bears, and other wildlife, but rarely included human elements.

Fery's work is recognized in many private collections and museums, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Museum on Church History and Art in Salt Lake City and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

French animalier sculptor Christophe Fratin was hailed as the greatest animal sculptor of the day at the 1851 Great Exhibition of London. Fratin learned animal anatomy by assisting in his father's taxidermy practice and studied art under the important French Romantic painter Theodore Gericault. Fratin's sculptures, which typically portrayed animals thin and gaunt as they would appear in the wild, reflected a life-like realism that was shunned by many of his fellow animalier artists who favored modeling their sculptures after well-fed zoo animals. Fratin was a contemporary of the renowned French animalier sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, and the two artists shared a similar struggle with the French Academy for acceptance of their work. Both Fratin and Barye first exhibited at the French Salon in 1831, were rejected in 1837, and did not submit again until 1850. Fratin received commissions from the French government for animal sculptures for the botanical garden and esplanade of his hometown of Metz. He was also commissioned to sculpt Two Eagles Guarding Their Prey for Central Park in New York. In addition to these monumental works, Fratin, like Barye, also made multiple castings of many of his sculptures for the growing middle class art market.

Born and raised in Utah, Edward J. Fraughton became interested in art, and especially sculpture, at an early age. He remembers carefully studying the design and form of his toy horses and soldiers when he was a child, finding that both sides of each figure were mirror images of each other with a seam running between. When he was in the fourth grade, he began drawing buildings and other objects he saw every day, winning the 1949 Milton Bradley Company's "America the Beautiful" Crayon Art Competition with a depiction of a local Victorian-era train station. He credits his teacher at Marsac Elementary in Park City, Alene Gibbons, with recognizing and fostering his talents. He also notes that his mother, Clara, and his stepfather, Charles "Zip" C. Nelson, encouraged his early artistic interests.

Following his childhood success, Fraughton attended the University of Utah to study civil engineering in hopes of becoming a sculptor of monumental works. He felt that taking classes in geometry, math and engineering would help him in the casting and armature building processes. While at the University, he also took classes in drawing and sculpture with Professor Ed Maryon and Dr. Avard Fairbanks and counts these men as influential in shaping his development as an artist.

Today Fraughton works to create sculpture that is both monumental in scale and that inspires its viewer to move around it, experiencing it from many different angles. He most often creates images based on wildlife and heroic historical subjects, and although he is talented at drawing, he prefers to remain a sculptor only. About his work, he says, "My quest as a sculptor has been to sculpt a three-dimensional design. Sculpture should never be designed from a narrow point of view. The best sculpture makes you move around it. A painter directs your eye from one part of the picture to another, the sculptor surrounds it." In addition to his many commissions throughout the United States, including the Mormon Battalion Monument in San Diego, California's Presidio Park, and the Spirit of Wyoming in Cheyenne, Fraughton is a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art and a longtime member of the National Sculpture Society and the Society of Animal Artists. He has exhibited throughout the United States at such venues as the Whitehouse in Washington, D.C., and at the Prix de West.

Emmanuel Fremiét began his study of art at an early age, encouraged by several of his artistic family members. Both his mother and cousin Sophie were artists who helped him realize his talent, and his uncle, the famous sculptor Francois Rude, had an enormous influence. By 1838, Fremiét was taking evening classes at the Petit Ecole in Paris, and by the age of seventeen, he had gone from being painter Jacques-Christophe Werner's apprentice to assuming the role of that master's head lithographer. All the while Fremiét continued to study sculpture and modeling with Rude until Cousin Sophie convinced the sculptor to officially take Fremiét as his pupil in 1842. By 1843, Fremiét had been accepted to the Paris Salon for his submission of a plaster statuette of a gazelle.

Throughout his career, Fremiét focused on sculpting the animal form, and became known for his depictions of animals in battle with humans. As a young man, the sculptor had spent considerable amounts of time at the Paris zoological gardens and the Jardin des Plantes studying both live and deceased animals in order to understand how to represent them accurately. Additionally, he had worked in the Paris Morgue touching up embalmed corpses, and had gained considerable knowledge of the human form through that experience.

Fremiét often had success at the annual Salon exhibitions, winning many awards and medals for his bronze sculptures. Until about 1872, the sculptor focused his energies on creating small-scale bronze animal subjects that he personally cast and marketed on his own. He also began receiving state commissions after 1850, and completed a large project for Napoleon III (ordered in 1853) that included 72 Figures from the Army of the Second Empire executed in a variety of materials.

The Franco-Prussian War caused Fremiét to flee his Paris home in 1870, and he became disillusioned with his career as a sculptor upon his return; for a time, he refused to draw or model. Despite this period of self-doubt, however, Fremiét went on to succeed Antoine-Louis Barye as professor of zoological drawing at the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle in 1875. This appointment solidified Fremiét's position as France's foremost sculptor of the Animalier movement. He continued to sculpt and exhibit until his death in 1910, although he dedicated a great deal of his later career to teaching. In addition to his professorship at the Natural History Museum, he was also director of sculpture at the Louvre, and taught classes in his private studio.

Fremiét's models continued to be cast throughout the period immediately following the sculptor's death, until the outbreak of World War I, by the Paris foundry of F. Barbedienne. His work is represented today in significant museums across the world, though the largest collection of Fremiét's bronzes can be found in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, France.

Richard Friese was a student and subsequently a professor at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he became acquainted with Carl Rungius and Wilhelm Kuhnert. Friese, Rungius, and Kuhnert were instrumental in expanding and refining the genre that would become wildlife art. Friese is considered to be one of the greatest painters of European and Arctic big game

Harriet Whitney Frishmuth received extensive art training in the Unites States and abroad. As a child she moved with her divorced mother and sisters to Paris and Dresden where they lived for eight years. There, she was fortunate to study under renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin, who encouraged her work and recognized in her a great deal of potential. She later went on to work under Jean-Antoine Injalbert as well as Cuno von Uechtrizt-Steinkirch. Her career took off upon her return to the United States as she began to study at the Art Students League and exhibited her work at the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Frishmuth was a member of a group of women sculptors and painters who referred to themselves as "The Philadelphia Ten." This group forged new ground for women artists and triumphed in the art scene at a time when opportunities for women artists to exhibit their work was scarce. The group, which included other reputable artists such as Isabel Branson Cartwright, Constance Cochrane, Mary Russell Ferrell Colton, and Edith Lucile Howard, exhibited between 1917-1945. This was a period of great change for women as they were becoming essential members of the work force due to WWI and WWII.

Best known for her whimsical dancing figures, flying through the air in pairs or posing alone, Frishmuth worked from live models. She frequently called upon the dancer Desha, who was well known among artists for her ability to hold difficult poses for extended periods of time. In order to augment her capabilities as an artist, Frishmuth enrolled in a dissection class at the College of Physicians. The sculpture owned by The National Museum of Wildlife Art, Ruppert Eagle, 1912, displays her mastery of conveying movement and grace in her subjects.

A well-known painter and illustrator of birds, Louis Agassiz Fuertes was born on February 7, 1874 in Ithaca, New York. He was named after Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor and naturalist. Growing up in Ithaca, Fuertes displayed an early interest in depicting birds. At the age of 14, he painted his first bird -- a male Red Crossbill. In 1892, he went on a family trip to Europe, where he was exposed to old master artworks, as well as many new species of birds. His parents' disapproval of painting as a career led him to enroll in Cornell University's Engineering School in 1893, from which institution he would graduate with an architecture degree, and also teach from 1923-1927. Upon graduating from college, he studied art for a year with Abbot H. Thayer, with whom he would remain in contact throughout his life. Another mentor Fuertes regarded highly was Elliot Coues, a leading ornithologist at the time. Fuertes created paintings and illustrations of birds for numerous books and magazines. For Arm & Hammer baking soda, he did a series of bird cards that were inserted into the product boxes, and which children enjoyed collecting. Fuertes was a member of several expeditions, one being the Harriman Alaska expedition in 1899, which allowed him to study and draw birds from around the world. His travels led him to explore Europe, Africa, Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, and the Bahamas. In his personal life, Fuertes married Margaret F. Sumner in 1904; they had two children. Fuertes did extensive field research, sketching birds in their natural habitats, and collecting specimens for studio resources. He had an innate ability to recreate a bird's coloring, anatomy, and position, as well as a capacity to recall precise detail from memory. Sadly, on August 22, 1927, Fuertes died when a train collided with his and his wife's car at Potter's Crossing, Unadilla, New York. "I still stick out for knowledge; good, sound, deep and appreciative knowledge as the one fundamental basic prerequisite of all art, and particularly of naturalistic art; my simple credo: it's easy, however, to believe in truth, as an abstract conception; quite another thing to discover and crystallize this truth into visible and permanent form." (Quote from: Peck, Robert McCracken. Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874-1927). Southwest Art, Nov. 1983:142).

Francois Furet is not a well-known artist today, however he was often commissioned around the turn of the twentieth century in Switzerland and France to produce landscapes and traditional academic compositions. He was, perhaps, best known for his murals, and worked mainly in oils, though sometimes executed watercolors as well. Trained primarily by Barthlemy Menn (who was working in a manner after the Barbizon painters), at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva between 1860 and 1865, Furet preferred to work en plein air when not completing mural commissions. The painter was also a lifetime student of art, and actively worked to keep pace with the ever-changing French art world of the late 1800s; until about 1900, Furet spent part of every year in Paris in order to gain insight into current artistic trends. His own personal style was influenced by Menn's Barbizon aesthetic, and was essentially realistic, though his color palette was informed by Impressionism. Because many of Furet's works were produced in the mural format, his painting is not widely represented in present-day public collections. Despite exhibiting work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and winning a bronze medal at the Universelle Exposition in Paris in 1889, his work resides mainly in private collections throughout Europe, and in North and South America.