(1905 – 1985) Eric Sloane (born Everard Jean Hinrichs) was an American landscape painter, illustrator and author of illustrated books on the cultural history and folklore of America. Sloane attended the Art Students League of New York and began painting rustic landscapes in the tradition of the Hudson River School. Beginning in the 1950s, the artist began spending pat of the year in Taos, New Mexico, where he painted western-style landscapes with particularly luminous renderings of the desert sky. He was a particularly prolific artist who became friends with Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was an enthusiast of both Sloane’s painting and his writing and said he was amazed at Sloane’s unorthodox painting methods for creating texture and line. Andrew Wyeth called Eric Sloane “an artistic treasure of Americana.”*