Maynard Dixon

Maynard Dixon
Maynard Dixon c. 1906
Born	January 24, 1875 (1875-01-24) Fresno, California
Died	November 11, 1946 (1946-11-12) (aged 71) Tucson, Arizona
Nationality	American
Known for	Painter
Movement	Tonalist, Impressionism, Precisionism
Spouse(s)	Lillian West Toby (1905-1917) Dorothea Lange (1920–1935) Edith Hamlin (1937-1946)

Maynard Dixon (January 24, 1875 – November 11, 1946) was a 20th-century American artist whose body of work focused on the American West. He was married for a time to American photographer Dorothea Lange.

Dixon was born in Fresno, California, into a family of aristocratic Virginia Confederates who had found a new home there after the American Civil War. His mother, a well-educated daughter of a Navy officer from San Francisco, shared her love of classic literature with the young boy and encouraged him in his writing and drawing. Dixon later studied briefly with the tonalist painter Arthur Mathews at the California School of Design where he became close friends with Xavier Martinez and others of the Bohemian Club. To support himself he accepted numerous illustration jobs. Great illustrators were plentiful around the turn of the century, yet Dixon obtained work from the Overland Monthly and several San Francisco newspapers.

In 1900 Dixon visited Arizona and New Mexico. This was the start of his lifelong passion for roaming the West. The next year he accompanied artist Edward Borein on a horseback trip through several Western states. In California, he illustrated books and magazines with Western themes. Some of his most memorable work from these early years appeared in Clarence Mulford’s books about Hopalong Cassidy. For a time he lived in New York with his young wife and baby daughter Constance, but soon returned to the western United States where he said he could create “honest art of the west” instead of the romanticized versions he was being paid to create. Shortly after he began a new life in San Francisco, his first marriage ended.

Dixon developed his style during this early period, and Western themes became a trademark for him. In San Francisco, Dixon was considered a colorful character with a good sense of humor. He often dressed like a cowboy and seemed determined to impart a Western style, most often in the form of a black Stetson, boots and a bolo tie.