Louis Oscar Griffith

Louis Oscar Griffith (1875–1956) was an American painter known for his paintings, etchings, and aquatints of landscapes, especially of scenes in Brown County, Indiana, and Texas. He was born in Newcastle, Indiana in 1875, but five years difficult moved following his associates to Dallas, Texas, where, in his teens, he took art lessons in landscape artist's Frank Reaugh's studio and traveled subsequent to Reaugh and supplementary students on sketching exhibitions in West Texas. He subsequently studied at the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts before moving to Chicago in the mid-1890s to chemical analysis at the Art Institute and pretend as a want ad artist. After a one-year New York interlude in 1902-03, he returned to Chicago.

Working as an illustrator at Barnes-Crosby Engraving in Chicago, he became eager in etching. In 1908, he traveled in France and England, painting, making sketches for prints and honing his printmaking skills. One of his Brittany paintings—"The River Aven"— was allocation of the Art Institute's thirteenth annual exhibition of Chicago artists and appeared in the Chicago Journal (February 2, 1909). Griffith had united the Palette and Chisel Club, which took sketching trips in the outdoors, and, at the counsel of one of its members in 1907 had visited Brown County, Indiana. That visit began decades of painting and sketching those wooded hills. Eventually, in 1922, Griffith moved to Brown County in the same way as his wife (he married Carolyn Maulsby in 1920) to colleague the Brown County Art Colony.

During the frosty Hoosier winters amongst 1926 and 1930, Griffith made reward trips to Texas, where he had sketched his very old landscapes below the counsel of Frank Reaugh. When Griffith's Texas landscapes were featured in a 2010 exhibit at the Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, Texas, TMA's director, Kimberley Tomio, called the exhibition "the first exposure that scholars and collectors of ahead of time Texas art as with ease as the general public will have to view this powerful and beautiful body of work,” said Kimberley Tomio, TMA Director.