Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) was born in Fresno, California, and began sketching at the age of ten. By the time he was sixteen, he had sufficient confidence in his work to send his sketch book to Frederic Remington, his illustrator hero, who replied with two encouraging letters. At eighteen, spurred on by the encouragement and advice of Remington, he enrolled in the San Francisco School of Design. Before he was twenty, he was working as a newspaper and magazine illustrator in San Francisco.

When he was not working on a commission in his San Francisco studio and later at his Tucson, Arizona studio, his time was spent on painting and sketching trips. These trips eventually encompassed every state in the West. From these field trips and the insights they produced, he evolved a mastery of his material and a highly distinctive style. Dixon's style, with its strong, dramatic forms and clear, vivid colors, was perfectly suited to murals and he painted many of them. Two of his outstanding works in this medium were painted in 1939 for the Department of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C.

In 1946 he prepared sketches for a large mural of the Grand Canyon for the city ticket office of the Santa Fe Railroad in Los Angeles. Already extremely ill, he nevertheless managed to supervise the execution of this last work at his Tucson studio. Within a month after its completion, he died.

Maynard Dixon's many works: sketches, drawings, paintings, illustrations and murals, attest to the deep understanding he had of his subjects--primarily the desert and its inhabitants, the Indians, early settlers and cowboys.