Born in Washington D.C., he moved to Denver with his family in 1893. In 1902 he won a scholarship t to the Art Students League of New York then studied in Paris. His early career was as a commercial artist and illustrator, splitting time between New York, Denver and Chicago. He later settled in Denver in 1927. During the Great Depression commercial work was scarce so Charles Waldo Love painted portraits of trappers, traders and Denver’s important citizens for the Colorado State Historical Society (now named History Colorado). Love continued to exhibit his landscape paintings from the 1930s–1950s and became a staff artist at the Denver Museum of Natural History (now named Denver Museum of Nature and Science) where he created habitat backgrounds, many of them atmospheric, colorful dioramas. Many of these backgrounds and dioramas are still used today.
