Harold Doolittle was born in Pasadena, California. An etcher, furniture maker and civil engineer, he studied at Cornell University and Throop Polytechnic Institute. Doolittle worked for many years as chief design engineer for the Southern California Edison Company. A bit of a renaissance man, he worked in all the graphic processes including photography and collotype but he is most noted for his aquatints. Doolittle built his own press, mezzotint rocker and preferred to make his own linen paper. He was a member of the Pasadena Society of Artists, Chicago Society of Etchers, Society of American Graphic Artists, California Society of Etchers and the California Print Makers. He served as president of the California Print Makers in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Dootlittle is represented in the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, California State Library, Dayton Art Institute and Brooks Memorial Gallery. His furniture and aquatints are featured in California Design 1910.

Dorgeloh was born in Watsonville, California. During her career as a printmaker during the WPA era, she made lithographs depicting urban architecture in San Francisco.

Arthur Wesley Dow was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts in 1857. In 1880, he received his first instruction in art from Anna K. Freeland of Worcester, Massachusetts. During the year that followed, Dow continued his studies in Boston with James M. Stone, a former student of Gustave Bouguereau and Frank Deveneck. In 1884, Dow traveled to Paris, where he attended the Academie Julian studying under John Henry Twachtman, Willard Metcalf and Edmund Tarbell. Dow returned to the United States in 1887. One year later, he had his first solo exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston. Soon after, Dow moved to Boston where he became interested in Egyptian and Aztec artifacts, which he saw at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Public Library. During this time, he began studying the prints of Japanese artist, Hokusai. Dow felt that art should be both pictorial and decorative. His view was shared by Ernest Fenellosa, the curator of Japanese art at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Fenellosa introduced Dow to the other masters of Sumi ink painting and woodblock techniques. During this time, Dow developed a technique for making woodcuts that reflected his study of Japanese methods. The subjects of his prints were largely found on Boston’s North Shore, a location he felt was suited to the Japanese-inspired appreciation of nature that he was trying to express. Dow was appointed assistant curator of the Japanese collection at the Museum of Fine Arts under Fenellosa in 1893. He taught at several institutions, including Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Art Students League in New York and at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. Dow’s work in print mediums extended into the first decade of the 1900s, during which he maintained a studio in Ipswich and conducted summer classes there.

Rackstraw Downes was born in England in 1939. He was educated at Cambridge University and Yale University. He worked for many years as an art critic before pursuing his own career as an artist. Downes’s subjects are usually industrialized rural landscapes and urban scenes devoid of human figures. Some specific subjects found in his work include, under the Gowanus Bridge in Brooklyn, NY; inside the World Trade Center; rural Maine; and the Donald Judd structures of Marfa, TX. In 1998, Downes received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Creative Artists Public Service Award. The following year, he became a member of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.

Otto Dix was born in Unternhaus, Germany in 1891. He became a student of the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts in 1910 accepting commissions to produce portraits to help fund his education. Dix volunteered for the German Army at the outbreak of WWI in 1914. He was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In 1915, he was sent to the Western Front as a non-commissioned officer with a machine gun unit. He fought on the Eastern Front in 1917, later returning to France to take part in the German Spring Offensive. By the end of the war, Dix was given the Iron Cross (second class) and had reached the rank of vice-sergeant-major. Dix’s art became increasingly political after the war as he developed left-wing views. He was angry about the way the many wounded and crippled ex-soldiers were treated in Germany. In 1924, Dix produced a book of etchings called, “The War” which was described by one critic as “perhaps the most powerful, as well as the most anti-war statements in modern art.” When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, it was clear that the Nazi government disliked Dix’s anti-military works. They arranged for him to be dismissed from his post as art tutor at the Dresden Academy. Dix went to live in south-west Germany near Lake Constance. Soon after, several of his works were destroyed by Nazi authorities in Germany. Dix was forced to join the German Army in 1945 and at the end of the war, he was captured and put into a prisoner-of-war camp. Upon his release in 1946, he returned to Dresden, which had been virtually destroyed by heavy bombing. Otto Dix died in 1969.

Dodd was a renowned landscape and portrait painter and printmaker.