Charles Craig

Charles Craig was a pioneering Western artist whose work was inspired by Native American life and the landscapes of the American West. Born on a farm in Ohio, he began painting as a boy using handmade materials. At nineteen, Craig traveled west along the Missouri River to Montana, spending four years living among Indian tribes and carefully recording their cultures. Realizing the need for formal training, he returned east, supported himself through portrait painting, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Peter Moran. After briefly returning to Ohio, Craig moved west permanently in 1881, becoming the first artist to paint in Taos, New Mexico, before settling in Colorado Springs, where he lived and worked for fifty years as the state’s first academically trained resident artist. Known as “Pink Face Charlie” for his cheerful temperament, Craig produced highly accurate Indian paintings and later tonal landscapes, exhibiting widely despite losing many works in a devastating 1895 fire.