Proceeds from this sale will benefit student scholarships at Grand View University.

William Robinson Leigh was born in Falling Waters, West Virginia, in 1866. Born less than two years after the end of the Civil War, his home county borders Virginia and Maryland and is a short distance from the battle sites at Antietam and Harper’s Ferry. The years of disarray in the South following the Civil War disrupted his early education and strained his family’s finances. Showing an aptitude for art at a young age, his mother, an artist herself, encouraged his art education. In 1880, thanks in part to the generosity of relatives and friends, Leigh enrolled at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, where he studied for three years before moving to Munich, where he studied at the Royal Academy for twelve years.

Upon returning to the United States in 1896, Leigh settled in New York City and worked as an illustrator for prominent magazines such as Scribner's, Collier's, and McClure’s. But, he longed to paint the West. The opportunity came in 1906 when the Santa Fe Railroad offered him free passage to the West in exchange for a painting of the Grand Canyon. This trip marked a turning point in his career, leading to the creation of his most significant works and a lifelong fascination with the landscapes and peoples of the Southwest.

Leigh's primary area of interest was the Hopi, Navajo, and Zuni Tribes. From 1912 to 1926, he spent every summer painting these communities, producing works that vividly depicted their daily lives and cultural practices. He took countless photographs and drew hundreds of sketches in an effort to accurately portray the simplicity and ancient beauty of life in the Southwest.

Leigh believed that the focus of American artists should be the depiction and preservation of this country’s unique contribution to the western world: the culture of the American West. One of the last eyewitnesses of the Southwest Frontier, Leigh felt an urgency in capturing western scenes, customs, and memories of the time before they were lost forever. Leigh ranks with C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington as one of the great painters of the American West. His tenacity and dedication to recording the Old West has left modern Americans with a means of connecting with the past.

“Probably no artist has painted the Old West more faithfully and magnificently than William R. Leigh…He not only lived among cowboys and Indians but did a great deal of work on their equipment and their methods of fighting and hunting. There was a romantic grandeur to all his paintings.”