Lanford Monroe

1950 - 2000

Elizabeth Lanford Monroe grew up surrounded by art and artists. Her parents, illustrator C. E. Monroe and portraitist Betty Monroe, and her Bridgewater, Connecticut neighbors, illustrator John Clymer and wildlife artist Bob Kuhn, were among her earliest mentors. “I don’t even remember learning to draw,” she once said. When her father needed a child-like illustration to include in one of his commercial illustrations, Landford got her first art “commission” at the age of six.

The Monroe family relocated to Huntsville, Alabama to be near Lanford’s grandparents, where Monroe said, “I grew up studying my father’s favorite tonalists: American landscapist George Inness and Swedish wildlife painter Bruno Liljefors. When he wasn’t illustrating, my father was also drawn to a tonalist palette, and I ended up following in his footsteps, preferring the subtleties of early morning and late evening.”

Monroe was awarded a Hallmark Scholarship in Fine Art and attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida. Following art school Monroe traveled extensively and lived in a variety of places, while she pursued various art projects. For a time in the 1970s she lived in South Dakota and was married to a member of the Lakota tribe or Teton Sioux, with whom she had a daughter.

During her time in the west, Monroe developed a real love of the west and of horses, which were often the subjects of her paintings and almost exclusively the subject of her sculptures. Early on she tended to paint in watercolors, later moving on to oil on Masonite, and by the mid 1990s to oil on canvas. Her paintings were often of ethereal landscapes in morning fog or a winter haze, animals being part of the scenery rather than the subject. However, she also painted a number of fox hunting scenes that are prized by collectors. And, her paintings were regularly exhibited at the Holland & Holland gun room in New York City.

In the 1980s, Monroe moved back to Alabama where she met and married musician and writer R. E. C. (Chip) Thompson. Anxious to move back west, in the early 1990s they moved to Taos, New Mexico, where Monroe enjoyed working from her large studio for the rest of her life.

Monroe’s work was greatly admired by famed wildlife artists Robert Bateman and Bob Kuhn. During her lifetime she received many awards, including: Society of Animal Artists Awards of Excellence, American Academy of Equine Art awards, a 1994 Grand Teton Natural History Association Award, and three awards from the Salmagundi Club. In 1999 Art of The West Magazine named Monroe one of 12 “masters for the new millennium” saying, “In our estimation, there is no one painting today who uses light and dark contrast with the skill of Lanford Monroe. Monroe’s magical moods will continue to win the hearts of collectors for generations to come.”

Tragically, Lanford Monroe died of a heart attack at the age of 50, just as she was about to mount up to go horseback riding with friends. Her life and more than 130 of her paintings have been chronicled in the book Homefields: The Art of Lanford Monroe by her husband R. E. C. Thomas, published by Sporting Classics, 2007.

FROSTY OUTING Oil on Canvas 17 ¾ x 23 7⁄8 inches