Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

We learn everything and nothing about Hans Kleiber in the following quotation from him:  "I had gone into forestry for the pure love of it. My years of work for the [United States Forest Service] filled a niche in my life that nothing else could have filled with deeper satisfaction and enjoyment."

How many collectible fine artists in the American West attribute the crux of their creative endeavors to a remote assignment in civil service, where they calloused hands with axe, dug fire line trenches with pulaski and strung together pack mules to inventory natural resources in the wilderness?

Not even frontier artist Charlie Russell or English-American Thomas Moran, the latter famously an artiste-de-camp for the Hayden Expedition in the founding of Yellowstone National Park, possessed such rough and tumble credentials.

Kenneth Schuster, director of the Bradford Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyoming—one of the sweetest provincial destinations in all of the U.S. West (and once visited by HRM Queen Elizabeth)—shares this observation: Of the early 20th century artists whose careers emanated from Wyoming, Schuster regards Elling William "Bill" Gollings (1878-1932), who had a studio in neighboring Sheridan, as the most prominent.

Besides Gollings, Schuster considers Kleiber the state's next greatest non-cowboy artist of his time.

For those unaware of Kleiber (1887-1967), which includes probably most readers of this story, he was not a sculptor. And, as a self taught oil painter and watercolorist, his execution could be described,...