Maynard Dixon (1875 - 1948). Maynard Dixon was an American artist whose body of work focused on the American West. He was married for a time to American photographer Dorothea Lange. Together with Fernand Lungren, another California based artist, Maynard Dixon is considered one of the finest artists having dedicated most of their art on the U.S. southwestern cultures and landscapes at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. He was born Lafayette Maynard Dixon in Fresno, California, named after his maternal grandfather. His family of aristocratic Virginia Confederates had found a new home in California after the American Civil War. His mother, Constance Maynard, 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. His father was Harry St. John Dixon. Dixon moved to San Francisco and studied briefly in 1893 with Arthur Mathews at the California School of Design where he became a close friend of the Tonalist painter Xavier Martinez, with whom he traveled to Monterey, Carmel, and Point Lobos. In 1900 Dixon visited Arizona and Mexico and a year later he accompanied artist Edward Borein on a horseback trip through several western states. Also in 1900 Dixon arranged for the debut exhibition of the soon-to-be-famous sculptor Arthur Putnam in the jinks room of the San Francisco Press Club. Dixon's sketching trip thru Arizona and Guadalajara in March and April 1905 with Martinez garnered much attention in the press. Dixon moved into Martinez's Montgomery Street atelier; their joint studio exhibitions were usually held on Saturdays. To insure a steady income, he worked as an illustrator for local newspapers and magazines, and illustrated numerous books, such as Clarence E. Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy. For his first exhibition in the southwest, Dixon contributed four oils to the show of Modern Art From The American West curated by the well-known impressionist Jennie V. Cannon at the University of Arizona in Tucson in December of 1912. In 1917, to support America's entry into World War I, Maynard Dixon joined Lee F. Randolph, Bruce Nelson, and other prominent artists on a committee to redesign the U.S. Army camouflage. During his long tenure in northern California, he became a prolific contributor to art exhibitions. His first publicized exhibition was a show of regional artists in Alameda, California during the spring of 1899. Thereafter he exhibited at almost every major venue: California Society of Artists; Bohemian Club; San Francisco Art Association; Newspaper Artists League; Press Club; Hotel Del Monte Art Gallery; Panama-Pacific International Exposition; Gump's Gallery; San Francisco Print Rooms; San Francisco's Don Lee Galleries; Oakland Art Gallery; Galerie Beaux Arts; University of California, Berkeley; California State Fair; and Golden Gate International Exposition. In March 1926, he acted as co-curator with Laura Adams Armer for an exhibit of Pueblo and Navajo Arts & Crafts at the Paul Elder Gallery of San Francisco under the auspices of the Indian Defense Association of Central and Northern California. In 1927 Dixon joined several prominent artists in a boycott of the Bohemian Club Annual Exhibition when works of the more modern artists were excluded. During February 1930 he was one of a handful of artists, which included Ralph Stackpole, Otis Oldfield, Helen Katharine Forbes, and several others, who contributed to a Galerie Beaux Arts show where the subject of every painting was the same female model. During the summer of 1931 he exhibited with the most prominent artists of the west, including William Ritschel, Armin Hansen, Granville Redmond, and Leland Curtis, at the Tahoe Tavern on Lake Tahoe. Between 1935 and 1943 he was a member of the Society of the Thirteen Watercolorists that exhibited at the: San Francisco Museum of Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Stanford University Art Gallery; and the de Young Museum. 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 hat, boots, and a bola tie.