A realist painter of the Old West and a highly successful illustrator, Ken Riley was born in Waverly, Missouri in 1919 and has had a studio in Tucson, Arizona from 1971.

He was raised in Kansas and received his art education at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he was a student of Thomas Hart Benton. Aware of Riley's unusual talent, a high school art teacher had paid for his first semester of tuition at the Institute. In 1941, Riley went to New York to study with Frank DuMond at the Art Students League*, and he also took evening classes at the Grand Central School of Art* and with illustrator Harvey Dunn.

Riley began his illustration career by selling work to the pulp magazines* for fifteen dollars each, but enl...