William Robinson Leigh

b. 1866—Berkeley County, WV
d. 1955—New York, NY

Education

  • Maryland Institute—Baltimore, MD (1880–1883)
  • Royal Academy—Munich, Germany

Biography

William Robinson Leigh’s long and impressive career is woven together by the twin threads of adventure and storytelling. Leigh decided on a career in art early. He enrolled in classes at the Maryland Institute (the country’s second oldest art school) at the age of fourteen and studied there for three years before leaving for the Royal Academy in Munich, where he spent over a decade. 

Upon his return to the United States from Germany in 1895, Leigh lived and worked in New York City, where he made a reputation as a book and magazine illustrator, creating images of everything from metropolitan to Martian life. Leigh’s sense of adventure also played out in an immersive cyclorama painting 115 yards in circumference and 15 yards in height.1 In 1906, he seized the opportunity of a trip west offered by the Santa Fe Railroad in exchange for a painting of the Grand Canyon. Leigh completed this commission and five other paintings, and the rest, as they say, is history. He would go on to become one of the country’s most famous Western American painters, earning numerous accolades by the end of his career.   

Leigh once offered this bit of advice to budding artists: “What you paint is more important than how you paint.”3 He lived by his words. For fifty years, Leigh traveled dozens of  times between New York and Arizona, New Mexico, and the mountain West, making hundreds of paintings of the landscape and people. Images of Native Americans feature prominently in his oeuvre—he painted Navajo and Hopi people every summer between 1912 and 1926.

It is also true that Leigh’s paintings captured the nation’s attention for their style in addition to their subject matter. By the 1950s, he had been dubbed “America’s Sagebrush Rembrandt,” admired for his detailed draftsmanship, use of color, and attention to the changing Southwest light. 

His apparent wanderlust and skill also twice took him to Africa on expeditions in 1926 and 1928 with the American Museum of Natural History, for which he painted animals and exhibit backgrounds. Over the course of his career, Leigh wrote and illustrated several books on his travels, including Frontiers of Enchantment: An Artist’s Adventures in Africa and The Western Pony.

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Gallup’s New Deal art collection consists of over 120 objects created, purchased, or donated from 1933 to 1942 through New Deal federal art programs administered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support artists during the Great Depression.

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