William James Aylward (1875-1956), master of seafaring art, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his father worked in a shipyard and as captain of a Great Lakes sailing vessel.

"My love of the the water and of things pertaining to it began at an early age," Aylward wrote. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students' League in New York, he studied at Howard Pyle's Wilmington, Delaware school of illustration.

There he learned to combine his two great passions, painting and the sea. He illustrated magazine stories for Harper's and Scribner's written by himself and others, including sea stories by Jack London and Joseph Conrad, and an edition of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Unde...