Robert Farrington Elwell

1874 - 19620

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Robert Farrington Elwell was the only child of a stone mason who encouraged Robert’s interest in drawing and a mother who was a musician who loved to draw as well. Robert attended a technical school in Boston, intending to become a civil engineer, and while there he learned drafting and lettering, which led to a job as a letterer and graphic artist for The Boston Globe newspaper.

When Elwell was 18 years old he met “Buffalo Bill” when William Cody brought his Wild West Show to Boston. Elwell had illustrated some of the advertising and publicity that Cody arranged through The Boston Globe. The two became close friends, and according to Elwell, “I was associated with Cody for many years in as close a relationship as father and son.” Like Cody, Elwell had two daughters, whom he named after Cody’s daughters, their middle names being the same as Cody’s daughters’ first names.

When Elwell was in his early twenties, he visited one of Cody’s ranches and ultimately became the ranch manager and irrigation engineer for Cody’s Wyoming ranch, a position he held for the next quarter century. It was at Cody’s ranches that Elwell was introduced to Frederic Remington, Diamond Jim Brady, Theodore Roosevelt, and Annie Oakley, who reportedly taught one of Elwell’s daughters to shoot. Another of Cody’s associates, Sioux tribal chief Iron Tail, even made Elwell a member of the Sioux tribe. For about three decades beginning in his mid-thirties, Elwell worked as a free-lance illustrator on a series of books for young readers, illustrations for Harper’s, Century Magazine, American Magazine, The Outing Magazine, Ladies Home Journal, and Arizona Highways, and covers for other magazines, including: Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Adventure, West, Short Stories, All Western, Ace-High, and Frontier Stories. In addition to working as a free-lance illustrator for magazines, Elwell produced illustrations for Winchester Arms and United States Cartridge.

By the time Elwell was in his mid-fifties the business empire Cody had built was gone and Elwell moved back east where he continued to paint and sculpt western subjects, though he still managed to spend his winters in Arizona, just outside the Prescott National Forest. Following World War II, Elwell moved back out west fulltime, eventually winding up in Arizona teaching at the Remunda Ranch, which would become known as the oldest family owned “dude ranch.”

Fittingly, a 1925 Boston Globe article seems to sum up Elwell’s life and career as an artist best, “In [Elwell’s] pictures and writings he lives over again much of the life he lived with Buffalo Bill in the Wild West show, on the ranches, on the prairies, foothills and mountain trails. And you feel the thrill of his enthusiasm for the great outdoors in all the pictures.”

GOING HOME Oil on Canvas 23 7⁄8 x 36 ¼ inches