William R. Leigh

William Robinson Leigh was born into a West Virginia family impoverished by the Civil War. At the age of 14 he went to live with his aunt and uncle in Baltimore and studied art at the Maryland Institute. Relatives also supported his trip to Germany in 1883, where he enrolled in the Royal Academy, Munich. Leigh studied there for 12 years, returning to New York in 1896 to work as an illustrator for magazines such as Scribner’s and Collier’s. Though he loved western subjects he did not make his first trip west until he was 40 years old. Bartering a painting for a ticket on the Santa Fe Railroad, he made his way to the Grand Canyon. Enraptured, he shifted his focus to paintings of life in the West. He spent the remainder of his career making regular trips to the Southwest, particularly to the Hopi and Navajo nations in Arizona.