Robert Wood was born on the south coast of England, not far from the white cliffs of Dover. His father,

W. J. Wood, was a famous painter who recognized Robert's unusual talent and sent him to art school at the age of twelve. He attended art school for several years and won four first awards and three second awards, one each year, a record. He came to the United States as a youth and traveled over the country and Canada and Mexico studying the people and the landscape.

For over 60 years, Robert Wood caught the pulse of inner America. He was America's most popular landscape artist. From his travels across the continent, he has presented us with a record of an unspoiled American landscape. In a very real sense, his paintings became an invaluable document of American's fast vanishing wilderness and seashores, depicted as only Robert Wood could.

He was aware of the new cross currents in American art, and had daily contact with these ideas. However, he elected to travel that solitary path and remain true to his own vision of what constituted the American landscape. It was not his paintings alone that brought him to the attention of the general public. Reproductions of those works found their was into every town, village and city. At one point, he was considered the most published artist in the world. His popularity has known no equal in American art in the field of landscape painting.

After living and painting in Texas for several years, he went to Carmel, California and began painting marine scenes. A short time later he moved to Laguna Beach where he became an outstanding figure in the Laguna Beach art colony and the art world in Southern California. He later lived in Bishop, California and in La Jolla. He died just short of his 90th birthday.

Although he shunned publicity and was modest about his accomplishments, he had millions of admirers who mourned his passing. There are thousands of artists in this country who learned a great deal by studying his work and the art instruction books he authored.