Howard Norton Cook

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, Cook moved to New York to study at the Art Students League in 1919. He worked as a commercial artist and illustrator for mainstream magazines. A commission to illustrate Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop inspired a trip to New Mexico, where he eventually settled. He was a master printer skilled in etching aquatint, lithography, woodcut, and wood engraving. He made many dramatic prints of New York's skyscrapers and bridges. In the 1930s he began working as a muralist and he had several major mural commissions in the Southwest.