Lyle Tayson

1924 - 2014

Lyle Tayson, Sr. was born in Omaha, Nebraska but raised in Chicago, Illinois. While he was in high school, he won a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago. However, Lyle dropped out of both high school and the Art Institute when he was 15 or 16 to travel around the country. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Tayson tried to enlist in the armed services but was denied because he was still only 17. Instead, the next day he joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and worked on convoys crossing the Atlantic, in the Mediterranean, and in the Pacific theater.

Tayson joined the U.S. Army during the Korean War and initially served as a radio operator, which he disliked, but he soon talked his superiors into reassigning him to work as a draftsman. When he walked by a building on the base one day where posters and illustrations were produced, he talked his way into being transferred, yet again, to that unit for duty. After serving three years in the Army, Tayson worked as a house painter and advertising illustrator.

In the early 1960s, Tayson moved to Los Angeles, California to work as a freelance illustrator, where he established a studio on La Brea Avenue. After a few years in Los Angeles he moved to Eugene, Oregon to be near his mother, working as an illustrator for The Eugene Register-Guard. While working at the newspaper, Tayson produced a series of 20 paintings depicting the Lewis and Clark Expedition that are now in the permanent collection of the University of Oregon. Tayson moved back to Chicago in the late 1960s and worked as an illustrator there for the next five or six years.

In 1974 Tayson decided to pursue a career as fine artist, eventually settling in Cheyanne, Wyoming, where he enjoyed a long and successful career, working both in oil and watercolor, painting western landscapes reminiscent of Bierstadt, historic portraits of Indians, and scenes portraying the everyday lives Indians and cowboys of the Old West. A number of Tayson’s historic Indian portraits in watercolor were used in 1977 to illustrate a series of first day covers postmarked in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lyle Tayson’s son, John, studied with him and followed in his footsteps, becoming a Western artist and later a Maritime artist, until his death in 2020.

WINTER HUNTER Oil on Board 30 x 40 inches