Cyrus Le Roy Baldridge Art

Cyrus Leroy Baldridge was a noted illustrator, painter, printmaker and writer. At the age of 10, he became the youngest student at Frank Holme’s Chicago School of Illustration. In 1907, he was accepted at the University of Chicago, where he continued his art education and graduated in 1911. Following graduation, Baldridge worked as an illustrator, later becoming a war correspondent on the battlefront during World War I. After the war, he settled in upstate New York and continued to work as a writer and illustrator while traveling the world with his wife Caroline Singer, who was also a writer. The couple traveled from Africa to India and Japan in the 1920s. Japanese art had a profound influence on Baldridge's work, during his time in Japan, he met the famed Shin Hanga print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo. He produced several woodblock prints for Watanabe during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1952, Baldridge and his wife retired to Santa Fe, where he fed his taste for adventure hiking the mountains of New Mexico, painting the landscape in oil and watercolor.