Meadowlark Gallery: The Artist Biographies

Frank B. Hoffman (1888-1958)
Frank B. Hoffman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1888 and died in Taos, New Mexico in 1958. Hoffman grew up around his father's New Orleans racing stables. Through a family friend he was hired to make sketches for the Chicago American, later becoming head of the art department. While working for the paper, he had five years of formal art training in private lessons from J. Wellington Reynolds, a portrait painter. In 1916, Hoffman went West to paint, living with the Indian tribes and the cowboys. He worked as public relations director for Glacier National Park where he met John Singer Sargent. In 1920, he joined the art colony in Taos, New Mexico. He studied with Leon Gaspard, gaining effective freedom in the use of color. He painted for corporate advertising campaigns and made illustrations on Western subjects for the leading national magazines in the 1920's. Successful as the best known New Mexico illustrator, he bought his own Hobby Horse Rancho where he raised quarter horses and kept as live models his longhorns, dogs, eagles, burros, and a bear. In the 1930's, he sculpted animal models. Beginning with 1940, he was under exclusive contract to Brown and Bigelow for calendar art, producing more than one hundred fifty Western paintings.
View high resolution images of works by Frank B. Hoffman when available.