Audley Dean Nicols
Audley Dean Nicols (22 September 1875–13 November 1941) was an American artist, illustrator and muralist. Born and raised in Sewickley, Pennsylvania; he studied in New York and Europe, and worked as an illustrator for various national magazines in the United States. He moved to El Paso, Texas in the early 1920s, where he painted desert landscapes of the American Southwest. Nicols achieved national recognition during his lifetime; his style and choice of subjects gathering followers who became known as the "Purple Mountain Painters". Life and career Born in 1875 in Sewickley from Pittsburgh along the Ohio River, Audley Dean Nicols was the son of Parshall D. Nicols, an iron broker, and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Agnes McLaughlin, an art teacher. He had a sister, Alice Clyde Nicols, and two brothers, Verner, who died of the Spanish Flu, and Lowell, who was an art critic and an optical glass research chemist. His mother Lizzie, who had studied with painter George Hetzel and taught drawing and painting at the Steubenville Seminary, gave him his first art lessons. After graduating from Sewickley High School in 1893 he went to New York to study under Harry Siddons Mowbray, Edwin Blashfield, and Kenyon Cox, at the Metropolitan