Field of Blossoms

A beautiful landscape oil painting of 1927 by artist William Henry Holmes is the basis for this range of art prints, posters and other wall art. The range includes mugs, other homeware and gifts, plus phone cases and iPad cases.

Holmes led a remarkably varied life as an anthropologist, archaeologist, artist, draftsman, explorer, geologist, government official, and museum director. While studying under Theodor Kaufmann in 1871 in Washington, D.C., he met Fielding B. Meek of the Smithsonian Institution, who hired him to illustrate his paleontological reports. This was Holmes’s first assignment requiring detailed drawings of fossils and other specimens.

In 1880 Holmes worked with Major Clarence E. Dutton, preparing highly detailed topographical drawings of the Grand Canyon region for Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District (1882). Holmes later worked in the Field Museum of Natural History and taught anthropology at the University of Chicago. He then directed the Bureau of American Ethnography and National Gallery of Art (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum) in Washington, D.C.

William Henry Holmes, born Cadiz, OH 1846, died Royal Oak, MI 1933.

Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. Anna Bartsch Dunne, 1927.