Desert Dweller

MONG THE early-20th-century artists who depicted the American West, Maynard Dixon is the only one who was actually born west of the 100th meridian. A native of Fresno, Calif., in the San Joaquin Valley, he “had to go east to see the West,” as the saying went. Over the course of a career that spanned the 1890s to the year of his death, 1946, Dixon portrayed the landscape and people of the great Western desert in a unique manner that is both modern and timeless, and his work reflects his deep personal immersion in that world. He painted not as a mere observer but as a participant. Born in 1875, he came of age as the Old West was dying out and reached the peak of his creativity during a time