About Howard Fogg
Howard Lockhart Fogg, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 7, 1917. He came from a family that was interested in trains and at least some of his interest in drawing and painting pictures of trains may be attributed to his grandfather, who was a draftsman for the Boston and Maine Railroad. The Fogg family moved to a suburb of Chicago in 1923, where Fogg senior worked for the Litchfield & Madison Railroad.
In time, Howard followed his father and attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he studied English literature, created cartoons for the college paper, painted trains, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1938. That fall he enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts with the intention of working as a cartoonist. After graduation, several uneventful jobs followed, including work as an apprentice engineer at the Baldwin Locomotive erecting shop until 1941, when Fogg was drafted into the army. The attack on Pearl Harbor prompted Fogg to transfer to the Army Air Corps where he trained as a pilot and received his commission and wings in 1942. Stationed in England, Fogg flew 76 missions escorting heavy bombers, many over Germany, and as a result, he was awarded the Air Medal with three clusters and the Distinguished Flying Cross with one cluster. Howard was discharged from the army as a captain in 1945, certain only that he wanted to be a railroad artist.
In 1946, Fogg was fortunate to meet with Duncan Fraser, the president of American Locomotive Co. (ALCO) in New York. Impressed by Fogg’s work, Fraser hired the young artist to paint locomotives in the color schemes of the railroads that were receiving new engines. His work for ALCO brought Fogg into contact with Lucius Beebe, an author who began commissioning and reproducing Fogg paintings in a variety of railroading books. Fogg also met John Walker Barriger III, an expert in rescuing struggling rail lines. As Barriger moved from line to line, he commissioned Fogg paintings to help promote each railroad. Fogg’s reputation as a painter began to grow.
In 1943, Fogg had married his college sweetheart, Margot Dethier, and the couple was able to buy their first house in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in 1947. The Foggs had friends in Colorado and, after visiting for several summers, they moved to Boulder in 1955. Fogg set up his studio there and continued to work for ALCO, although his long-term agreement with the company ended in 1957. Thereafter, Fogg worked as a freelance painter. As his reputation grew, Fogg found that his paintings
were in such demand that he had a backlog of orders that would require several years to fulfill.
During the course of his long career as an artist, Howard Fogg completed more than 1,200 paintings, most in watercolor, although some 200 were in oil. As a young artist, he once completed 45 watercolors in one year. As a freelance painter, he often needed about two weeks to complete one work, while late in his career each painting took about six weeks to complete.
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