1866-1955
William R. Leigh, born in 1866 in Berkeley County, West Virginia, began his formal study of art at the Maryland Institute, Baltimore, at the age of fourteen. After three years at the Institute, he went to Munich, Germany, where he studied at the Royal Academy for twelve years, and took the annual medal six times in succession. He also assisted in the painting of six cycloramas. Commemorating the 6th anniversary of the one in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, he received an illuminated parchment citation in 1953.
In 1906, at the age of forty, after ten years in the United States as an illustrator for leading magazines, he headed for the Southwest for the study of Indians, cowboys and animals. Under the inspiration of repeated trips to Arizona, New Mexico, as well as the Dakotas, Wyoming and other northern Rocky Mountain states, he produced many pictures owned by important collectors all over the United States and in foreign countries, including the Duke of Windsor and the late King Albert of the Belgians.
Mr. Leigh accompanied Carl Akeley to Africa in 1926 and the Carlisle-Clark expedition to Africa in 1928, each time as artist for the collection of material for the Akeley African hall in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. From 1932 to 1935 he had charge of the painting of the background in the African Hall at the time of its construction. Some of his best known work is immortalized in this hall.