Donald Teague - Gifted Gallery
- Lilium
- Jul 23
- 2 min read
Donald Teague, born 27 November 1897, was an American magazine illustrator and painter. He illustrated many magazines, and he painted in the art colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Teague was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was trained at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After serving in the Navy during WWI, he became the pupil of Norman Wilkinson in London. Upon his return to New York he studied under George B. Bridgman and Frank DuMond at the Art Students League of New York. He thrived under the tutelage of Dean Cornwell, who helped Teague begin his long art career as an illustrator in 1921.
Teague was a magazine illustrator throughout the 1920s and 1930s, initially for the Saturday Evening Post in New York and for Collier's in California by 1938. Teague was also an illustrator for McCall's and Woman's Home Companion. He also recieved commissions for book illustrations inclduing Oliver Twist and The Pilot. With his wife Verna, Teague had two daughters.
In the 1920's, Teague spent several summers on a Colorado ranch. When he moved to California in 1938, he specialised as a Western illustrator until Collier's ceased publication in 1958. After finishing his career as an illustrator, Teague devoted his entire time to painting. Teague became a genre painter whose realistic watercolours depicted both observed and imagined landscapes. He became focused on cowboys and frontier towns in the Old West, portraying the pioneer era of American history with a dramatic narrative flair.
Teague subsequently joined the art colony in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where he painted for four decades.During his lifetime he won international recognition and numerous awards for his paintings, including five First Prizes from the National Academy of Western Art, both the Gold and Silver Medal Honors from the American Watercolor Society, the S.F.B. Morse Gold Medal from the National Academy of Western Art, and two Gold Medals from the Cowboy Artists of America.
Donald Teague died on 13 December 1991, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, aged 94. Today, Teague's works can be found in the collections of the National Center for American Western Art in Kerrville, the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and the Phoenix Art Museum, among others. By the time of his death, he had become known as "the dean of American watercolorists" according to The Los Angeles Times.
His work has been exhibited in major museum collections throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Watercolour Society, the Tokyo Museum, the Peking National Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Watercolor in Mexico City, Chicago's Art Institute, the Sydney Museum in Australia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Reading Recommendations & Content Considerations
Donald Teague
A life in Color
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