Chester Snowden (1900 - 1984)

Chester Snowden was born in Elgin, Texas. He attended The University of Texas in Austin and the Cooper Union in New York as well as studying at the Art Students League of New York, Grand Central Galleries Art School, also in New York and the Richard Art School in Los Angeles. His teachers included Harry Sternberg, Boardman Robinson and Walter Jack Duncan. Snowden worked as a painter and an illustrator, for decades providing art for the publications of naturalist author, Royal Dixon. As an illustrator, his social circles overlapped with the literary personalities of his time. He reported in Houston’s Mirror in 1968 that he had counted among his friends and acquaintances Robert Frost, George Bernard Shaw and Edna St. Vincent Millay and that his studio was once owned by O Henry. He showed in many Annual Exhibitions of Work by Houston Artists as well as the Annual Southeast Texas Artists Exhibition, Texas General Exhibition, Annual Texas Artists Circuit Exhibition and Texas Painting and Sculpture Exhibition. He also exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. His work can be found in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.