Solon H. Borglum

Nothing influenced Solon Borglum's art more than the animals and people who inhabited or invaded the American West during the late nineteenth century. As it did for his contemporaries Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, the West became the focus of Borglum's intense powers of observation and the subject of his art.

Borglum was born to Danish parents who had immigrated to America in 1864. After a decade of living in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho, the family finally settled in Fremont, in western Nebraska. Solon's father was a physician but had begun his adult life as a wood carver, which almost certainly influenced Solon's older brother, Gutzon, to pursue a career as an artist. Having shown little interest in formal schooling, the younger son spent his teens working on a ranch his father owned near Fremont. He showed a talent for drawing horses, and his careful studies of their movements prompted Gutzon to encourage Solon to pursue art as a profession. In 1893 Solon gave up ranching and went to Omaha to study with J. Laurie Wallace, a former pupil of Thomas Eakins.

Following this early, and evidently brief, formal training, Solon joined Gutzon at his home in the Sierra Madre Mountains. A personality clash with Gutzon's wife, however, forced Solon to move on he went to Los Angeles, where he painted portraits, and to Santa Ana, where he taught art privately. He had little success, however, and in November 1895 he went to Cincinnati, where he entered the Art Academy. One of his instructors, the sculptor Louis T. Rebisso, encouraged him to try sculpting, and his first effort was a sculpture of a group of horses based on observations and drawings he had made at the United States mail stables in Cincinnati.