Lanford Monroe

Born in Bridgewater, Connecticut, in 1950, Lanford Monroe was the daughter of illustrator C.E. Monroe Jr. and his portraitist wife Betty. Monroe showed an early talent for art and spent her childhood years in the same neighborhood as western artists John Clymer and Bob Kuhn. She attended the Ringling School of Fine Art in Sarasota, Florida, after winning a Hallmark Scholarship. Monroe began her career working in watercolor but soon made the transition to oils and became known for her dramatic landscapes featuring North American wildlife. Though she painted a wide range of animal subjects, she preferred horses and produced a large body of work devoted to them. Monroe lived in many parts of the United States during the course of her career; at the time of her death she was working in a studio in Taos, New Mexico.