Maynard Dixon · 1875–1946

Maynard Dixon: a biography

Illustrator, muralist, poet and painter, Maynard Dixon spent more than fifty years drawing and painting the American West, and became one of the defining painters of its deserts, mesas and skies.

A Fresno boyhood

Lafayette Maynard Dixon was born on January 24, 1875, in Fresno, California. His father, Harry St. John Dixon, was a former Confederate officer from Mississippi who became a lawyer and rancher; his mother, Constance Maynard, encouraged his reading and drawing. An asthmatic child, he took to drawing early. At sixteen he sent two sketchbooks to Frederic Remington, who wrote back in 1891: "You draw better at your age than I did at the same age."

San Francisco and the illustrator years

In 1893 the family moved to Alameda, and Dixon enrolled at the California School of Design in San Francisco, where Arthur Mathews taught. He stayed only about three months. By 1895 he was illustrating for the San Francisco Morning Call, and he went on to draw for the Overland Monthly, Sunset and other publications, and to illustrate books.

In 1900 he made the first of many trips through the Southwest, sketching in Arizona and New Mexico. The next year he travelled through Nevada, northeastern California, Oregon and Idaho with the artist Edward Borein, and in 1902 he stayed for about two months at Lorenzo Hubbell's trading post at Ganado, Arizona, the start of a long friendship.

The San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed his studio, with his canvases, his library and many of the Navajo rugs he had collected. In 1907 he painted his first murals, four lunettes for the Southern Pacific depot in Tucson. He then tried New York, where he found steady work illustrating magazines and books, but he wanted to paint the West rather than illustrate a romanticized version of it. In 1912 he returned to San Francisco.

A new way of seeing the desert

Dixon exhibited at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and won a bronze medal. His first marriage ended in 1917. In 1920 he married the photographer Dorothea Lange, and the couple had two sons, Daniel (born 1925) and John (born 1928).

In the early 1920s he made long stays among the Navajo and Hopi in Arizona: four months on the Navajo reservation in 1922 with Lange, and, in 1923, a visit to the Hopi village of Walpi with his patron Anita Baldwin, after which he stayed on for several more months to paint. Over these years his style changed. He moved away from Impressionism toward simplified, strongly designed compositions: low horizons, flat-topped mesas and banks of marching clouds. That manner became his signature.

He also painted murals, among them work for the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco and the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, and he helped guide the Galerie Beaux Arts, a cooperative San Francisco gallery for contemporary artists run by Beatrice Judd Ryan from 1925 to 1933.

The Depression years

In 1933 Dixon and Lange spent the summer in and around Zion National Park, Utah. In 1934 he began a series of paintings of unemployed and displaced men, sometimes called the "Forgotten Man" pictures, a rare turn to social subject matter in his work. He and Lange divorced in 1935.

Utah, Tucson and the last years

In 1937 he married the San Francisco muralist Edith Hamlin. That year Brigham Young University acquired a large group of his paintings and drawings; the BYU Museum of Art now holds the largest collection of his work. In poor health, Dixon left San Francisco's damp climate. He and Hamlin built a summer home and studio at Mount Carmel, Utah, and spent winters in Tucson, Arizona, where they built a house and studio. He kept painting the desert country of southern Arizona and Utah, completed his last mural, a Grand Canyon scene for the Santa Fe Railway's Los Angeles ticket office, in 1946, and died at his Tucson home in November 1946. Hamlin later brought his ashes to Mount Carmel.

Legacy and collections

A retrospective of his work was held at Scripps College in Claremont in 1945. Today the largest public collection is at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, and the Maynard and Edith Hamlin Dixon home and studio at Mount Carmel is maintained by the Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts. Dixon also wrote poetry throughout his life, and he remains one of the most widely recognized painters of the American Southwest.

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Sources

Original text prepared for this site. Facts were cross-checked across the sources below. Sources disagree on a few dates (for example, the year he moved to New York and the exact day of his death), so this page gives only what they agree on.

1. "Maynard Dixon Timeline." maynarddixon.org/timeline.
2. Nevada Museum of Art, exhibition text, "Maynard Dixon." nevadaart.org.
3. Arizona Highways, "Meet the Master." arizonahighways.com.
4. Wikipedia, "Maynard Dixon." en.wikipedia.org (accessed October 2026).