WILLIAM BILLY GOLLINGS

1905. William Gollings was born in pre-statehood Idaho in 1878, shortly after the Nez Perce War. Gollings spent his early childhood in Pierce, a mining camp located in the northern part of the Idaho territory. With familial ties to Chicago, he moved between the remote territory and the cosmopolitan city as a child. In Chicago, he nurtured his interest in art as a self-taught artist using a mail-order painting set. The work he produced during this time eventually earned him entry into the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, where he studied for two years. Restless and seeking to travel the country, however, he traded art school for a one-way train ticket to South Dakota. After moving out West, he lived a nomadic life on horseback, working odd jobs while learning various goldmining and frontier skills such as how to brand and herd cattle, fur trapping, and panning. This experience would later inform his paintings, as he drew from direct experience when depicting the cowboy culture of the Southwest. He eventually arrived in Montana, where his brother had a ranch and was able to sustain this lifestyle for five years before returning to Chicago on an art scholarship in 1905.

At the Academy in Chicago, Gollings met and worked closely with a number of artists who also reflected an interest in the Southwest. He was eventually drawn back to the region, settling in Wyoming, where he established an art studio. He fell into the region’s circle of Southwest painters and was mentored by J.H. Sharp, the founder of the Taos Society of Artists and a revered early chronicler of Native American life and culture in the region. From Sharp, he learned important painting techniques, which furthered his artistic style and provided him with the necessary tools for working in this specific environment. Gollings led a prolific and notable career as a Southwestern painter, dying in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1932 at the age of 54. His paintings and drawings are part of the collections of the Gilcrease Museum, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and the National Museum of Wildlife Art.