William Herbert “Buck” Dunton (1878-1936)
Buck Dunton was born in Augusta, Maine on August 28, 1878. Having spent much of his time in the woods of Maine with his grandfather, he developed a keen interest in the outdoors, hunting and animals that would last throughout his life. Dunton began sketching on his excursions, and by the age of twelve, he was selling illustrations to his local newspapers and to the Boston Sunday Globe.
Dunton attended Cowles Art School in Boston and studied at the Arts Student League in New York in 1912. It was there that he met Ernest L. Blumenschein, his teach and mentor.
In 1898, Blumenschein had been traveling through New Mexico with Bert Phillips on a sketching expedition. A wheel on their wagon broke off just north of Taos and forced them both to spend more time there than anticipated. They fell in love with New Mexico, its sites and its landscapes. Dunton was subsequently influenced by Blumenschein’s interest in Taos, and he began visiting there regularly in 1912. In 1915 he opened a studio in the town and moved there permanently in 1921. It was during this period that the Taos Society of Artists was initiated with Buck Dunton as one of its founders. This formally organized group of artists included Blumenschein, Joseph Henry Sharp, Oscar E. Berninghaus, Ranger Irving Couse and Bert Geer Phillips. The group had as their objective the preservation and documentation of the fading American West.
In his early years as an artist, Dunton worked primarily as an illustrator for publications such as Harper’s and Scribner’s, as well as for Zane Grey’s novels. Dunton’s favorite subjects were generally the New Mexico wildlife and old-time cowboys, both often portrayed with the extraordinary detail typical of his work.