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.