Tom Lovell Military Art

Born in 1909, Tom Lovell was the first artist to win the National Academy of Western Arts highest honor, the Prix de West, twice. He was elected to the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1974 and eventually named a Hall of Fame Laureate. In 1992, he was honored by both the National Academy of Western Art and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame with a Lifetime Achievement Award and a prestigious one-man retrospective show. Known as a traditional painter of art, prints and posters depicting Western history, Tom Lovell was born in New York City. I enjoy recreating the past, he once said. As a boy, books of adventure in far off times and places were real. At seventeen, I shipped as a deckhand on the Leviathan and various other jobs followed. Enrollment in the College of Fine Arts at Syracuse University was the next step. At this time the newsstands were filled with pulp magazines and I produced a cover in oils and eight or ten dry brush illustrations a month during my senior year. The message on the covers had to out scream a hundred others. After graduation I continued to free lance for the pulps for six years before tackling the slicks. In 1944, I enlisted in the Marine Corps and was assigned to an easel. Illustration continued to flourish after the war. Tom Lovell passed away in 1997.