Edwin Austin Abbey Lived during 1852 to 1911 was an American artist. Come illustrator and a prolific painter. He prospered at the foundation of what is now considered to be as the “golden era” of design, and is well renowned for his prowess in drawings and paintings of Shakespearean and Victorian as his theme of subjects. His most familiar work, ‘The quest of the Holy Grail’, still perches in the public library of Boston. Abbey was born in Philadelphia in the year 1852. He was educated in arts at the ‘Pennsylvania academy of fine arts’. Abbey started his lustrous career as an illustrator, producing a number of illustrations and sketches for such publications as Harper’s weekly and Scribner’s magazine. In the 1907 he rejected an offer of knighthood consecutively to maintain his U.S. citizenship. Welcoming with other émigré American artists, he summered at Broadway, England, Where he painted his last of the creations and vacationed his life then on.

Vincent Colyer was born in 1825, Bloomingdale and died on July 12 1888 on Contentment Island was a successful American artist renowned for the images he created of the American West and a humanitarian who volunteered with philanthropic and Christian missionaries and the U.S. government in his urge to help freed the black slaves and preserve the ever diminishing trade of Native Americans. Vincent Colyer was a well known master of American topographical watercolors. His small, painterly watercolor sketches of the long existing western forts, the early settlements and the Indian villages, ranging all the way from New Mexico to Alaska, are an important artistic and visual record of what this ethical artist vision was all about. More than 2 hundred of those sketches, mostly created in the field between 1868 and 1872 while employed as a Special Indian Commissioner, are found in major institutional collections of the greats.