John Ford Clymer was renowned for documenting the American frontier, western history and wildlife, John Ford Clymer was born in Ellensburg, Washington. At a very early age he was interested in art, having taken correspondence art courses from the age of thirteen.

Although unsolicited, by the time he was sixteen he sold his first two illustrations to Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. He was amazed that an art director would purchase these illustrations, since he had no formal training, but his work was clearly suitable for publication. The ingenuity and raw talent was driving the young man into illustration as a profession, and this was recognized by anyone who saw his work.

The Colt illustrations were used for advertisements, published and republished over again, to his utter delight. After graduating from high school, Clymer moved to Canada and worked as an illustrator for billboards and as a sign painter in Vancouver, where he took art classes at night school, until he was twenty-three. He studied at the Vancouver School of Fine Art and then later at the Ontario College of Art.

As he matured, Clymer traveled throughout the Canada to get immersed in the North-Western environment, which he loved to paint best; wildlife, mountain men, trappers, Indians, and the flora of the region, his region. In 1927, Clymer worked on a Yukon River steamboat and visited gold mines, river trading posts, logging camps, and he created a visual encyclopedia of memories of the changing times and scenery as the landscape was altered by encroaching civilization.

In 1930, John Clymer attended the Wilmington Academy in Delaware, where he was strongly influenced by NC Wyeth and Wyeth’s students; Gayle Hoskins, Stanley Arthurs, and Douglas Duer. In 1932, he married and a few years later moved to Westport, Connecticut to join the artist colony there, where he studied further with the famed Harvey Dunn and later at the Grand Central School of Art in NYC.

Illustrator Walt Louderback was his hero, although he was also impressed with Dean Cornwell and NC Wyeth. Clymer’s illustrations were published in the Saturday Evening Post, True, Field and Stream, and he painted calendars for twenty-eight years for the American Cyanamid Company, and advertising for the New England Life Insurance Company for more than a dozen years.

During World War II, John Clymer and illustrator Tom Lovell, joined the Marines together. They were stationed in Washington State and spent the war painting illustrations for the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck magazine. When Clymer was discharged in 1945, he recontacted the Post Magazine and started doing covers once again, and he painted as many as ninety covers in all.

In 1966, John Clymer and his wife Doris moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further his penchant for painting local people, indigenous wildlife and flora, in order to once again create a visual record of the changing times and losses in the environment. John Clymer said that he always tried to take the viewer of his art “to an actual place and make him feel that he was really there.”