Gerard Curtis Delano

Delano was born in April 1890 in Marion, Massachusetts; sources disagree on the exact day, giving either April 4 (Pulp Artists) or April 14 (Wikipedia). He began his art training locally at the Swain Free School of Design after selling his first illustration to Life magazine. In 1910 he moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League, studying under George Bridgman. He went on to study at the Grand Central School of Art in New York with the illustrators Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn, and N.C. Wyeth. Through the 1910s and into the 1920s he worked as a commercial illustrator for magazines including Life, Collier's, and Cosmopolitan.

In 1919 Delano made his first trip West, working as a ranch hand in Summit County, Colorado. He went on to homestead land on Cataract Creek, Colorado, in the early 1920s, building a studio and log cabin there, and increasingly turned his attention from illustration to painting. He became especially known for his portraits of Navajo people and for landscapes of the Colorado high country and the Southwestern desert. Of his Navajo subjects he said, "The Navajo people are a proud and beautiful race of great dignity. It is my idea to show them as I know them. There are few poorer people anywhere, yet it would be difficult to find a happier lot, and I wonder if there is not a lesson in this for all of us."

Delano continued to paint into his eighties. In January 1972 he held a solo exhibition at Park Floral in Denver that he described, in a letter to a friend, as the best attended show of his career. He died later that year. The most detailed published account, by biographer David Saunders, places his death on October 27, 1972, at his summer home in Opdyke, Illinois, at the age of eighty two. Other sources confirm the month and year of his death but do not specify the day or place.

Delano's critical standing rests less on contemporary art criticism than on his positioning within the history of Western American painting and Navajo genre subjects. A Denver Post Empire Magazine feature by Richard G. Bowman, who also wrote the 1990 biography Walking with Beauty: The Art and Life of Gerard Curtis Delano, credits him with a body of work "regarded as standing alongside the Western masters." His paintings are held by the National Museum of Wildlife Art and by the Anschutz Collection, whose acquisition of The Navajo, a painting Delano himself considered one of his best, has been cited as a benchmark of institutional demand for his work. No comprehensive record of juried prizes or academy awards for Delano could be confirmed in available sources; his recognition is documented primarily through museum acquisition and auction results rather than a list of formal honors.

The highest price commonly cited for a Delano painting is USD 1,247,000, which Coeur d'Alene Art Auction describes as the artist's world record. Published accounts differ on which painting achieved that price, with some attributing it to Evening and others to a work titled The Smoke Signal, and no source publishes an exact sale date, so the figure should be treated as a claimed record rather than a fully documented one. Coeur d'Alene's own results page also lists two other high six figure Delano sales, In Bonnet and Paint at USD 786,500 and The Trail Ahead at USD 409,500, again without published sale dates. The most fully documented individual sale, with a named work, exact price, house, and date, is Colorado, which brought USD 149,000 at Heritage Auctions on November 16, 2015, described by that house as its own record for the artist. Delano's market runs through Western art specialist auction houses, including Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, Heritage Auctions, Santa Fe Art Auction, and Scottsdale Art Auction, and there is no single gallery or estate representative of record.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Delano, and no single gallery or estate manages his market; verification depends on the Western art auction houses and dealers who regularly handle his work. Reported prices for his top lots are inconsistent across market databases, including disagreement over which painting holds the artist's own auction record, so collectors should treat any single "record price" claim with care and confirm sale details directly with the auction house before relying on it. His exact date and place of death are documented in only one detailed published source, though the year and month, October 1972, are corroborated elsewhere; his exact birth day is similarly disputed between two sources. Museum holdings, including the National Museum of Wildlife Art and the Anschutz Collection, are a more reliable signal of his standing than any individual auction result.