Maynard Dixon

After a successful career as an illustrator, Maynard Dixon built a reputation by creating work that blended modern art influences with scenes from the West. A native of Fresno, California, Dixon had little formal training aside from a few months of art classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco; he learned primarily through sketching and his commission work for newspapers, books, and magazines such as Sunset and Harper’s Weekly. He traveled throughout the western states and Southwest acquiring material for his works. During the 1910s, he turned from illustration work to pursue a painting career. He opened a studio in San Francisco, working in oil, watercolor, and gouache. By 1940 he had relocated to Utah near Zion National Park. Dixon was interested in contemporary ideas about art, particularly post-impressionism and cubism, and adapted these elements into his own work. He became particularly celebrated for his modernist landscapes of the West.