Edward von Siebold Dingle was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 18, 1893. As a boy he lived on a plantation near the Santee River and developed an early interest in birds and in drawing them. He graduated from the College of Charleston, but as an artist was self-taught, except for some instruction in landscape from Alfred Hutty.

About 1923, when Dingle was living in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, he took up art as a career and combined it with his avocation of ornithology. He collected over a thousand bird specimens, from a four-foot albatross to a half-inch hummingbird, and learned from Arthur Trezevant Wayne how to prepare and preserve them (The collection is now at the Charleston Museum). Painting live birds from dead specimens was not simply a matter of copying. As Dingle explained, "It takes years of research to become a bird painter. You must have accurate scientific knowledge of how the feathers of a particular bird grow, and how their bones and muscles are placed."

Dingle's primary medium was watercolor, and he painted birds against landscape and foliage backgrounds which suggested their natural habitats. Each painting featured not only an adult male and an adult female, but a juvenile or post-juvenile bird also. He painted birds in families.The largest family he painted was the Warbler Family, which required sixty-one paintings. Research for that series took Dingle to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Charleston Museum, the national and royal museums of Canada. Harvard University, the universities of Oklahoma, Minnesota and Michigan, and to several institutions in California. In 1963 his Warbler series was exhibited at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston.

Dingle had fourteen watercolors and a charcoal sketch in the first American exhibition of bird paintings, held in Los Angeles in 1926. In 1937 some of his works were included in the First National Exhibition of American Artists at Rockefeller Center in New York. His works also were exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Canada. He is represented in the permanent collections of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, at the Cambridge Museum in Massachusetts, the Carolina Art Association and the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston. His paintings were reproduced in numerous scientific periodicals, and in books like South Carolina Bird Life, where Tufted Titmouse appears. The Tufted Titmouse, also called the Tomtit or Peter Bird for its call "peto-peto-peto," is common throughout the eastern United States and west of the Mississippi River to about eastern Nebraska. It is among the smallest North American birds with a crested head. Dingle's research led to the addition of six species to the list of South Carolina birds: Cory's shearwater, Eastern glossy ibis, Leache's petrel, European widgeon and Clay-colored sparrow.

After 1927, when Dingle married Marie G. Ball, they lived at Middleburg Plantation in Huger, South Carolina. He died on April 21, 1975.

THE SOUTH ON PAPER: LINE, COLOR AND LIGHT, Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc., Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1985, p. 35.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston