John Clymer

1907-1989

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 had sold his first two illustrations to Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut. Amazing that an art director would purchase these illustrations, since Clymer had no formal training at all, but his work was way above average and suitable for publication. The ingenuity and raw talent was driving the young man into illustration as a profession and it was recognized by anyone who saw his work. The Colt illustrations were used for advertisements, published and republished over again, a number of times-much to his utter delight.

After graduating from high school, Clymer moved to Canada and worked as an illustrator for billboards, and a sign painter in Vancouver, where he took art classes in night school, until he was twenty-three. He studied at the Vancouver School of Fine Art and then at the Ontario College of Art. As he matured, Clymer traveled throughout the Northwest and Canada to get immersed in the environments which he loved to paint best-wildlife, mountain men, trappers, and Indians and the flora inhabiting the region, his region.

In 1927, Clymer worked on a steamboat on the Yukon River and visited gold mines, river trading posts, logging camps, and he created a visual encyclopedia of memories of changing times and scenery as the landscape began to change with 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 artists colony there. He studied with Harvey Dunn in Westport and later at the Grand Central School of Art in NYC. The illustrator Walt Louderback was his hero, although he was always most impressed with Dean Cornwell and NC Wyeth. Clymer’s illustrations were published in the Saturday Evening Post, True,  Field and Stream,  he painted calendars every year for 28 years for the American Cyanamid Company, and an advertising series for the New England Life Insurance Company.

During World War II, he and his friend from Westport, illustrator Tom Lovell, joined the Marines together. They were stationed in Washington and spent the war painting illustrations for the Marine Corps Gazette and Leatherneck magazine. When he was discharged in 1945, Clymer rejoined the Post magazine and started doing covers once again, perhaps as many as ninety.

Clymer and his wife Doris moved in 1966 to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to further his penchant for painting local people and indigenous animals and flora in order to create a visual record of bygone and changing times. 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.”