Thomas Calloway "Tom" Lea, III was a Legendary Texas Artist & Author. Tom Lea was Born in El Paso,Texas on July 11, 1907. His father Thomas Calloway Lea, Jr. was a prominent frontier lawyer and later served as El Paso's mayor from 1915 through 1917. Tom Lea has several of his paintings on display in the US Presidential Oval Office. From 1941-1946, Tom Lea served as a World War II war correspondent/artist to cover the war in the Pacific for LIFE Magazine. During this time Tom Lea painted the sinking of the American aircraft carriers USS Hornet (CV-8) and the USS Wasp (CV-7), and the invasion of the Japanese held island of Peleliu. Texas Legend Tom Lea was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1907. He studied for three years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was an apprentice to John Warner Norton, one of the most respected muralists of the 1920s and 1930s. During the Great Depression, Tom Lea painted murals in Washington, D.C., Texas, Missouri, and New Mexico for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Like other prominent American regionalists, he was less influenced by European modernism and generally preferred to render landscape and people in a realistic style. In the late 1930s, Tom Lea expanded his artistic repertoire by illustrating books by writer and folklorist J. Frank Dobie. By World War II his illustrations—particularly his ability to portray the common person—had attracted the attention of publisher Henry Luce, who hired him as a war correspondent for Life magazine. Tom Lea accompanied the Allied forces into both theaters of war, documenting the horrific reality and raw emotion of war in a way that had rarely been seen before. Tom Lea returned to El Paso following the war and took up yet another career alongside his painting, this time that of a writer. He produced six books over the next 20 years, including a two-volume history of the King Ranch in Texas and two best-selling novels, in the early 1970s painting again became his priority, although he did continue with his writing.

Tom Lea is perhaps the best Texan artist and writer, he was born in El Paso, Texas on July 11, 1907. After displaying a natural aptitude for painting and drawing as a child, Tom Lea received his formal training at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1924 to 1926 and as apprentice and assistant to the Chicago muralist John Norton from 1927 to 1932. In 1930, Mr Lea traveled to Italy to study the techniques of Renaissance wall painting. One of his early murals "The Nesters," painted in the Post Office Department Building in Washington, D. C., won a national competition in 1935. There followed a commission to paint the mural, "Pass of the North," in the United States Court House in El Paso. J. Frank Dobie commissioned Tom Lea to illustrate a couple of his books from this period, "Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver" (1939) and "The Longhorns" (1940). During World War II, Life magazine hired Tom Lea as a combination war correspondent-artist to cover the war in the Pacific. Tom Lea's experiences during World War II gave him first hand experience as a technical writer, and lead to the publication of "A Grizzly from the Coral Sea" (1944) and "Peleliu Landing" (1945). TomLea's lifelong friend Carl Hertzog, a book designer, printed both books as well as Tom Lea's Bullfight Manual for Spectators (1949). After the big war, Mr Tom Lea began to write fiction, including The Brave Bulls (1949), The Wonderful Country (1952), The Primal Yoke (1960), and The Hands of Cantu (1964). The Brave Bulls won the Carr P. Collins Award of the Texas Institute of Letters for best book by a Texan, and The Hands of Cantu won the Texas Institute's Jesse Jones Award for the best work of fiction by a Texan. Both The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country were produced as motion pictures. Tom Lea continued to write non-fiction, including the two-volume The King Ranch (1957), A Picture Gallery (1968), and an account of King Ranch operations in Australia, In the Crucible of the Sun (1974).

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As an artist, Tom Lea was commissioned by Life magazine in 1946 to paint a series of canvases depicting Western Beef cattle, which Life Magazine presented to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. In 1953, the University of Texas Press published "Tom Lea: a Portfolio of Six Paintings" with an Introduction by J. Frank Dobie. Tom Lea's first large exhibition was mounted in 1961 at the Fort Worth Art Center. TomLea has also had exhibitions at the El Paso Museum of Art, Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio and the Adair Margo Gallery in El Paso Texas. The Harry Ransom Center has a nice collection which includes over 200 works completed while Tom Lea attended the Chicago Art Institute and later while living in Santa Fe. The items include pencil sketches, charcoal, ink, blue pencil, sketches of models and designs for murals and advertising art, Native American design motifs, linoleum block prints from New Mexico, and one etching. Other art works by Tom Lea can be found in the Ransom Center J. Frank Dobie Collection. Tom Lea's art is featured in collections throughout the nation, including one at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.