William Herbert Dunton did not live to finish his autobiography, which he intended to be called The Story of a Happy Life, but the title is appropriate.

Dunton's career in the late 1890s and early 1900s gave him early prosperity as one of the country's most popular illustrators of Western cowboy and frontier life. He was able to retire at 43 to Taos, New Mexico, where he occupied himself with his greatest pleasures-hunting, camping, painting and writing.

Born in 1878 in Augusta, Maine, Dunton was a self-taught artist. As a boy, he roved the woods and fields with gun, sketchbook and pencil. He had already sold some of his drawings and stories to local periodicals by the time he quit school at 16.

By 1896, he had begun a successful commercial career in New York City. He illustrated sporting magazines and his own published stories. He produced innumerable covers for many major magazines, including Saturday Evening Post, Woman's Home Companion and Harper's Weekly. He also illustrated 49 books, among them several Zane Grey cowboy classics.

Dunton went West every summer, working on ranches, hunting and sketching from Oregon to Mexico. Every winter, he worked feverishly in New York City.

He attended some classes at Cowles Art School in Boston and the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied with Fred Yohn, Frank Dumond and Ernest Blumenschein among others.

Blumenschein introduced Dunton to Taos. By 1912, at age 43, Dunton had accumulated a comfortable fortune. He left the East and moved to Taos, where, with Blumenschein, he was one of six charter members of the Taos Society of Artists.

Dunton's Taos landscapes and cowboy portraits show his thorough training, but added a new technique of strong, patterned brushstrokes. He continued to write and illustrate his own stories, and began to make detailed lithographs of animals. In the 1920s, Dunton made three lunettes for murals in the Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City.

Dunton died at age 58 in 1936 in Taos.

Memberships:
American Federation Of Arts
Salmagundi Club
Society of Independent Artists
Springfield Art Association
Taos Society of Artists

Public Collections:
Harwood Foundation of the University of New Mexico
Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City
Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe
Wine Memorial, San Antonio, Texas

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton