Frank Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1862. He was encouraged by his parents to learn by experimentation, so he began painting birds in his teens. During these years he explored the marshes around Salem while shooting and sketching waterfowl. His formal education in art commenced when he was 19 with Otto Grundeman, Frederic Crowninshield, and others at the School of Painting and Drawing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1883, after a trip to Cuba with his father, Benson went with his friend and Museum School classmate Joseph Lindon Smith to France, where he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. Upon his return in 1885, Benson worked as a portrait painter in Salem and taught in Portland, Maine for two years. He married Ellen Peirson in 1888, and in the following year, he began teaching at the School of Painting and Drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Benson attained his initial success as a portrait and figure painter, using interior and exterior compositions. While he never abandoned this sort of painting, in 1912 he began depicting game birds and waterfowl with greater frequency. In addition to painting in oils, he often drew in ink wash, composed in watercolor, and took up etching. His lifelong enthusiasm for angling and wing shooting provided him with the experience necessary to make his work as accurate as possible. His etchings in particular proved to be so popular that he nearly exhausted himself on more than one occasion in trying to meet demand. He produced over 350 individual plates in his lifetime. A complete set of etchings and drypoints printed from these plates is in the collection of the Boston Public Library. In 1935, Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling asked Benson to design the second of the Federal Duck Stamps; the result, done from his wash drawing Canvasbacks, is the rarest example of that series. Benson was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, the National Academy of Design, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the National Association of Portrait Painters, the Society of American Etchers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Ten American Painters. He exhibited several works at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Institutions holding his work include the Carnegie Institute, the Buffalo Academy of Fine Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy. His murals of The Three Graces and the Four Seasons are in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Benson died in Salem, MA, on 15 November 1951.