When William Robinson Leigh was a young boy growing up in rural West Virginia, he won a large cash prize for a drawing of a dog, and thus his career was launched. His mother was determined to provide him art lessons, so when he was fourteen years old she arranged for him to study at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. Several years later he continued his training at Munich’s Royal Academy. After many years in Europe, he became convinced that it had been “painted pretty much to death.” Deciding that the American West was “the really true America and what I wanted to paint,” Leigh returned to the United States.

When he made his first trip west, in 1897, it was not to sketch cowboys and Indians but to illustrate an article on wheat farming for Scribner’s Magazine. Although Wyoming farmland and taciturn farmers did not offer the type of western exposure that attracted so many artists, the experience reinforced Leigh’s determination to paint in the West.

Leigh did not return to the West until 1906 when he heard that the Santa Fe Railway provided transportation to the Southwest to artists in exchange for paintings to use in its advertising campaigns. Persuading the railway’s advertising director Will Simpson to send him to the Grand Canyon, he soon headed for Arizona.

Leigh’s Southwestern adventure exceeded his wildest dreams, and his paintings greatly impressed Simpson, who assured the artist that he was “anxious that you should go southwest again and am disposed to help.” Leigh eagerly accepted Simpson’s support. In return he painted several of his finest Grand Canyon scenes for the Santa Fe.

The Grand Canyon was not Leigh’s only Arizona subject. The Hopi and Navajo Indians who lived in the region were strongly appealing to him. For more than a dozen years, beginning in 1912, he spent every summer among them depicting their customs and ceremonies.

Leigh achieved his distinctive signature style by combining the suave realistic technique he had mastered in Germany with the intense colors of the American Southwest and his natural gift for drama. Riding Out the Sandstorm is characteristic of the commotion of color, action, and tension in his best narrative works. Less well known are contemplative landscapes such as The Thinker that allowed him to explore atmospheric effects in the vast landscape.

Leigh’s writing could be as flamboyant as his color palette. Convinced that Western artists—and he included himself—had not received their just due, he rose to their defense. He once insisted that America should be grateful for its Western artists “because they have beheld with their own eyes . . . the mighty force of the vivid life which is fast vanishing . . . these things have stirred these men to the depths, and imbued their souls with emotions too profound to be quelled.”

Wide recognition of Leigh’s importance as an American artist was very late in coming. He did not receive the recognition he had long strived for (and deserved) until he was in his seventies, and was not elected to the prestigious National Academy of Design until 1953, two years before his death, in 1955, at the age of eighty-seven.