Provenance: Strong-Fox Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, 2004 Private collection, California Gerard Curtis Delano was born in Massachusetts, the son of a sea captain. His family was so connected to the ocean that he was first named Gerard Tobey, after his father’s three-masted sailing ship. It was only later he was renamed Gerard Curtis after the ship’s owner. Delano could have easily lived his life on the sea, but an early interest in art propelled him toward drawing and painting, and then later into illustration, where he studied with Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn and N.C. Wyeth. A 1919 trip to a Colorado ranch profoundly altered his trajectory. He spent the next 50 years devoted to the West and its people. “Asked for my philosophy about my work, I say simply that I feel that I have been given a great talent in order to give beauty to the world,” Delano wrote in Walking With Beauty: The Art and Life of Gerard Curtis Delano. “I feel that that is my job, my directed mission in life; that I have been definitely inspired in my work by God; and that, in fact, I am but an open channel, a medium acting on ideas—‘messages’—from above.”