William R. Leigh
William Robinson Leigh was one of the most prolific painters of the American West and is well known for his dramatic images of Western landscapes, wildlife, cavalry, cowboys, and American Indians. His use of European techniques in painting large-scale images of the American West eventually earned him the nickname "America's Sagebrush Rembrandt."
As a young boy, Leigh drew portraits of farm animals and at the age of six, won first prize at the Martinsburg County Fair for a paper cutout of an elephant chasing a man on horseback. In 1880, he began his formal artistic training at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, where he studied under Hugh Newell, a former student of British sporting artist Sir Edwin Landseer.
In 1883, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, Leigh sailed to Germany where he studied for twelve years at the Royal Academy in Munich. After his rigorous training in draftsmanship and composition, Leigh returned to America in 1896 and worked as a magazine illustrator in New York City.
In 1906, bartering a painting for a ticket with the Santa Fe Railroad, Leigh made his first trip to New Mexico. He documented the Southwest by sketching and painting studies of the Pueblo Indians, the landscape, and the animals. In his unpublished memoirs, he wrote, "I saw that so far as possible, I must be a sponge, soak up everything I saw. I must know the manners and customs, the people and their deployments. In short, absorb all that was humanly possible to absorb. I started in to paint, paint, paint."
Throughout his life, Leigh returned to the Southwest. He also visited other parts of the West, including the Rockies of Wyoming and the Yellowstone area. In 1926, he joined an expedition to Africa led by Carl Akeley and gathered studies for the background dioramas that he painted for the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Leigh died two weeks after being elected into the National Academy of Design. His widow, Ethel Traphagen, founder of the Traphagen School of Fashion in New York, gave his entire collection of work to the Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The New York Herald Tribune called Leigh "the last surviving member of the famous western painting trio that included Frederick Remington and Charles Russell."
