Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait was a British wildlife painter from Liverpool, England. Born in 1819, Tait was raised in the countryside of Lancaster with relatives due to his father’s financial problems. Here he developed a love for nature and began drawing at the age of eight. He was largely self-taught, visiting and copying other paintings and became interested in sporting images and animals. A trip to Paris in the 1840’s introduced him to George Catlin’s traveling exhibition of the American Indians and intrigued him enough to travel to the United States in 1850. He established a studio in New York City and kept a small camp in the Adirondack Mountains where he would escape the city life to paint the romanticized pictures of wildlife scenes, landscapes, and sportsmen that would bring him recognition.

Though he never traveled past the Adirondacks, Tait was known as one of the leading painters of the American frontier. He illustrated over thirty-six prints for the Currier and Ives Lithographers before his death in 1905 and created many medium-sized, moderately priced wildlife paintings.