Donald Teague

"Can't Keep a Good Man Down" Story Illustration for SEP, 1928

1928

Donald Teague, N.A. (1897-1991), one of the premier watercolorists of this century, was born in Brooklyn, New York. From 1916 to 1917, he studied under Bridgman and DuMond at the famed Art Students League in New York. After serving in the Navy during WWI, he became the pupil of Norman Wilkinson in London. Upon his return to New York he continued his studies at the Art Students League under the tutelage of Dean Cornwell, who helped Teague begin his long art career as an illustrator in 1921. Because he was the primary illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, he signed Collier's illustrations with another name, Edwin Dawes. In the 1920's, Teague spent several summers on a Colorado ranch. When he moved to California in 1938, he specialized as a Western illustrator until Collier's ceased publication in 1958. After finishing his career as an illustrator, Teague devoted his entire time to painting. During his lifetime he won international recognition and numerous awards for his paintings, including five First Prizes from the National Academy of Western Art, both the Gold and Silver Medal Honors from the American Watercolor Society, the S.F.B. Morse Gold Medal from the National Academy of Western Art, and two Gold Medals from the Cowboy Artists of America. His work has been exhibited in major museum collections throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Watercolour Society, the Tokyo Museum, the Peking National Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Watercolor in Mexico City, Chicago's Art Institute, the Sydney Museum in Australia, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The uniqueness of Donald Teague's work lies in his own personality and in his ability to transmit it into a painting, to tell in watercolor what he saw and felt when he discovered the subject of the painting. His watercolors are a kind of realism he calls synthesis, for rarely, if you returned to the spot and the moment where a Teague painting began, could you find the same image as that in the painting.