Nick Eggenhofer

Born in Gauting, Bavaria, Nick Eggenhofer became a painter of the romance of the American West with its cowboys and Indians.

In 1913, at the age of sixteen, he came to America with his family from Germany, and three years later he enrolled in night art classes at Cooper Union in New York. He later established an illustration studio in New Jersey and made a living as a commercial artist, illustrating hundreds of western magazines and books between the 1920s and 1940s. He became a collector of western artifacts including saddles, guns, and Indian paraphernalia.