Born in Wauconda, Illinois, Henry Howard Bagg painted numerous scenes of western life in Colorado and Nebraska and became one of Nebraska's early prominent art professionals. He often worked from photographs, and his style was basically realistic with tonalism and luminism.

Little is known about his early childhood except that he referred to having lived on a large estate in Northern Illinois and credited his mother for his early art education and encouragement in that endeavor. His father was a country doctor and his mother a teacher in a girls' seminary. He took formal art study from a Professor Woodruff in Aurora, Illinois. In the late 1870s, he married Ida Pettibone of Lanesborough, Massachusetts, the community in which his paren...