Maynard Dixon

Born in Fresno, California in the San Joaquin Valley, Maynard Dixon, originally named Henry St. John Dixon, became a noted illustrator, landscape, and mural painter of the early 20th-century American West, especially the desert, Indians, early settlers, and cowboys.

He briefly attended the Mark Hopkins Art Institute where he learned art fundamentals, but left after three months, deciding to travel and paint from nature. He wandered and sketched all over the West and Northwest—Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and exhibited regularly with the San Francisco Art Association.

Maynard Dixon lived most of his life in the West, living at times in Mount Carmel, Utah; Tucson, Arizona; and the desert of California near Mecca and Indio. His close friends were artists Jimmy Swinnerton, John Hilton, and Clyde Forsythe.