Charles Atherton Cumming (1859-1932) was an important Iowa artist. He was a true "founder" involved in the organizing and developing of schools of art while teaching and pursuing his own career. He originally studied at Cornell College in Iowa but later transferred to the Chicago Academy of Art, which later became the Art Institute of Chicago. He returned to Cornell in 1880 and taught art classes before leaving in 1855 for the Academie Julien in Paris. He returned to Iowa and established schools in Des Moines and at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City. He was well recognized for his portraiture.

George Inness, one of America's foremost landscape painters of the late nineteenth century, was born in 1825 near Newburgh, New York. He spent most of his childhood in Newark, New Jersey. He was apprenticed to an engraving firm until 1843, when he studied art in New York with a French landscape painter from whom he learned the classical styles and techniques of the Old Masters. In 1868, he was elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design. In 1877, he helped found the Society of American Artists.

Edwin Lord Weeks [1849-1903] was born at Boston, Massachusetts. He was a pupil of Léon Bonnat and Jean-Léon Gérôme, at Paris. He made many voyages to the East, and was distinguished as a painter of oriental scenes. Weeks' parents were affluent spice and tea merchants from Newton, a suburb of Boston, and as such they were able to accept and certainly finance their son's interest in painting and travelling. He spent two years in India before returning home to Paris. His paintings of Indian life gave him celebrity both in France and America and they became his specialty. In 1896 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour and he continued to paint right up to his death in 1903, which is thought to have been due to an illness contracted in India

Benjamin Foster's (1852-1926) painting speciality was bucolic scenes of the New England countryside. His style was predominantly Tonalist with subdued colors and limited tones---almost exclusively autumn colors, muted browns, grays and rusts. In Tonalist tradition, he completed most of his paintings, both oil and watercolor, in his studio and not on location. 

William Edwards Cook  Adoption fee $1500 Cook was born in Independence, IA and became a well known expatriate artist living in Paris, Rome, Russia and Majorca.  He was a long time friend of Gertrude Stein.  In 1926 he commissioned LeCorbusier to design is home in Paris.

C.E. Baldwin was born in Hopewell, NY in 1866.  He was director of the first art school in Des Moines from 1892-1895.

Joseph Ringeisen Adoption fee $500  Ringeisen was a German oil painter born in 1906. 

T.F. Simon  Adoption fee $350   Simon was a painter, etcher and woodcut artist who studied in Prague.  He traveled extensively and images of his travels appear in his work.

George McCord Adoption fee $500  McCord is a highly regarded artist known for his watercolors, oils and pastels, as well as his black and white drawings.  He traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe to create his atmospheric landscapes.

Andrea del Verrocchio was born in Florence, the son of a brick and tile maker. Nothing is known about his early training. In 1465 the magistrates of the merchants' guild of Florence commissioned him to execute a bronze Doubting of Thomas to occupy a marble niche earlier executed by Donatello and Michelozzo for the principal facade of Orsanmichele in Florence. When the group was finally placed in its niche in 1483, the diarist L. Landucci called the head of Christ "the most beautiful head of the Saviour that has yet been made." The Doubting of Thomas is one of the most important sculpture groups of the entire Renaissance. It is a dramatic masterpiece of spatial arrangement between two high-relief, life-size figures (the statues are actually hollow shells of bronze, without backs) and an exquisitely ornamented Renaissance niche.