Watercolors of the Game Country of East Africa by Sanford Ross, March 10-April 9, 1940

Pierre Sanford Ross was an American realist painter and printmaker born on January 25, 1907 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut and studied art at the Art Students League in New York City under Thomas Hart Benton in 1928 and under George Luks in 1929. He also studied lithography with Adolf Dehn. He entered Princeton University in 1930 but chose to leave a year later to pursue a career in art. He held his initial solo exhibitions in New York in 1932-1933 to early critical approval of his American scene painting. Subsequently, he showed regularly in New York art galleries.

In 1933 and 1935 he was commissioned by Fortune magazine to make watercolor illustrations. Also in 1933, he was a Works Progress Administration artist in Connecticut. His works of the 1930s show clear influences of Precisionism, Regionalism and the Ashcan School. His work was included in the special 1938 edition of PM magazine that reproduced the best American prints of the previous five years, and in the Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art in 1940. An avid sportsman and photographer who occasionally contributed articles to Country Life, Ross regularly engaged in deep sea fishing. In December 1936 he left the United States to spend three months fishing in New Zealand, then traveled through Asia to present-day Kenya where he hunted big game on safari. Returning in the fall of 1937, he produced a series of watercolors of Africa that toured the United States as this exhibition under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.

In 1947 he married Rebecca Brock Hughes. Along with her three young daughters of a previous marriage, they moved to a farm near Barnard, Vermont. Their son was born in 1950. In this rural setting, Ross devoted himself to painting watercolors and oils of Vermont including scenes of ordinary farm work. Physically unqualified to serve in the military, Ross spent World War II in Vermont, occasionally teaching art at nearby Dartmouth College. By 1950 Ross also had become known for his commissioned oil portraits of children. He died suddenly of a heart attack in Barnard, Vermont on March 1, 1954.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_Ross