L. Maynard Dixon was born near Fresno, California in 1875. He was an interpreter of western landscapes and Native American themes. He was a painter, a muralist, and an illustrator. He died in 1946 in Tucson, Arizona. Although he was primarily self-taught, Dixon briefly studied at California Institute of Design in 1893. He worked as an illustrator for several California publications before going to New York where he worked at Scribner's and Harper's Monthly from 1907 to 1912.He received a bronze medal for Trail in Oregon (1915) at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In the 1920s, he received many commissions to paint murals in California including the dining room in steamship Silver State (1923), the Pageant of Traditions at the Sacramento State Library (1928), and the proscenium in the auditorium at the Oakland Technical High School.http://www.maynarddixon.org/