Researching Richard Sloan

Considered to be North America's "Dean Of Rainforest Painters", Sloan was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended the America Academy Of Art. He then worked as an advertising illustrator before joining Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo as staff artist. After a 1966 sellout solo exhibition at the Abercrombie & Fitch Gallery in Chicago, Sloan left Lincoln Park to embark upon a lifetime of capturing the world's rainforests in paint. He was the first wildlife artist in North America to turn all his efforts as a painter to documenting exotic animals of the world's tropics.

He first traveled to British Guiana (Guyana) in 1969 and made seventeen expeditions to the Amazon Basin, the Peruvian Andes, Guatemala, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and Thailand.

His paintings have been exhibited at the National Geographic Society's Explorers Hall, the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Gilcrease Museum, the Royal Scottish Academy and numerous other museums and galleries.

Since 1979 his work has been included in twenty-five Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum Birds In Art exhibitions, and in 1994 the Museum conferred upon Sloan the honor of Master Wildlife Artist. In March 2002 at the invitational, juried exhibition Impressions Of Bonnet House in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, he was given the Peoples Choice Award.

His works are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Illinois State Museum, the Denver Museum of Natural History, the North Carolina Museum Of Natural Sciences and private collections throughout the world.

He has been commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund to design postage stamps and first day covers for Trinidad, Tobago, Guatemala, the Philippines and the Falkland Islands. In the spring of 1998, the University Of Arizona Press published The Raptors Of Arizona, a 220-page volume on the birds of prey of the American Southwest, featuring 42 Sloan paintings. In recognition of this work, in August, 2003, he was inducted into the Arizona Outdoor Hall of Fame.