W. Herbert Dunton

William Herbert "Buck" Dunton was born on August 28, 1878, in Augusta, Maine. He left school at sixteen to earn money as a commercial illustrator, selling his first drawing to a magazine that same year, and worked for a time as a ranch hand out west before formal art study. In 1897, after moving his permanent residence to Boston, he enrolled at the Cowles Art School and studied further with Andreas M. Andersen, William L. Taylor, and Joseph Rodefer DeCamp. He built a career as an illustrator for periodicals including Harper's, Collier's, and Scribner's.

Around 1911 to 1912 he took classes at the Art Students League in New York, studying under Frederick C. Yohn and Frank V. DuMond and, briefly, Ernest L. Blumenschein, who told him about Taos, New Mexico. Dunton moved there in 1912 and became a charter member of the Taos Society of Artists when it formed in 1915, joining a group devoted to painting the people and landscape of the Southwest. In 1921, the oil executive W. H. McFadden commissioned him to paint a full length portrait of the big game hunter Ben Lilly, which was exhibited by the National Academy of Design before entering McFadden's home in New Orleans. His work also appeared regularly in the annuals of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, and his painting The Cattle Buyer was selected for the 1924 Venice Biennale.

He died in Taos, New Mexico, on March 18, 1936, at the age of fifty seven.

Dunton earned strong critical notice within his own lifetime as an heir to the Western painting tradition. In October 1913, American Art News linked him to the legacy of Frederic Remington as a chronicler of the West. By 1927, the critic and painter Alexandre Hogue described him as being "in the front rank of living American painters." Scholarship since, notably Michael Grauer's writing on the artist, has treated his 1920s and 1930s output as among the strongest American painting of that period, grounded in his firsthand experience of ranch work rather than a purely romanticized view of the frontier.

Dunton's auction market spans a wide range. His all-time high is A Race for the Chuckwagon, an oil on canvas measuring 34 by 51 inches, which sold for USD 1,434,000 at The Coeur d'Alene Art Auction in Reno, Nevada; the auction house states that this remains the world record price for the artist, though the exact sale date is not published in its public results. By contrast, Heritage Auctions lists its own house record for Dunton at a considerably lower USD 286,800, from a 2007 sale, and most works that come to market fall well below the top price. There is no confirmed exclusive estate or gallery representation; his paintings move principally through Western-art specialist auction houses, including Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, Heritage Auctions, Santa Fe Art Auction, and Scottsdale Art Auction.

Dunton's market has one confirmed seven-figure result and a much larger body of sales in the mid five to low six figures, so a single top price should not be read as typical. There is no published catalogue raisonne, which puts more weight on documented exhibition history and on institutions such as the Stark Museum of Art, which holds a substantial group of his paintings. Because no exclusive gallery or estate currently represents the artist, buyers are dealing primarily with the secondary market, where provenance and clear sale documentation matter more than they would for a living artist with active representation.