- Term
Maynard Dixon
- Alternate Term
Dixon, Maynard
Dixon, L. Maynard
Dixon, Maynard?
- Occupation/Role
painter
- Nationality/Ethnicity
American
- Remarks
Maynard Dixon was born in 1875, Fresno, California into a family of aristocratic Virginia Confederates who had found a new home there after the American Civil War. Dixon studied briefly with the painter Arthur Mathews at the California School of Design where he became close friends with Xavier Martinez and others of the Bohemian Club. To support himself he accepted numerous illustration jobs. In 1900 Dixon visited Arizona and New Mexico. This was the start of his lifelong passion for roaming the West. For a time he lived in New York with his young wife and daughter, but soon returned to the western United States. In 1912, Anita Baldwin McClaughry commissioned Maynard Dixon to paint murals for Indian Hall and Jinks Room in her mansion near Pasadena. Shortly after he began a new life in San Francisco, his first marriage ended. Meeting and marrying Dorothea Lange, a portrait photographer from the East, had a great influence on his art. They married in 1920, but divorced in 1935. Dixon married his third wife, muralist Edith Hamlin in 1937. He died in 1946 at his winter home in Tucson.