About the Subject:  Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan on February 4, 1902 and died on August 26, 1974 on the Hawaiian island of Maui.  Lindbergh was an American aviator, an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve, author, inventor, and activist. At the age of 25 in 1927, he made his mark on aviation history for making the first nonstop flight from New York City to Paris. Lindbergh covered the ​33 1⁄2-hour, 3,600-mile flight alone in a single-engine airplane christened the Spirit of St. Louis. This was the first solo transatlantic flight, the first transatlantic flight between two major city hubs, and the longest transatlantic flight by almost 2,000 miles. This flight is widely considered a significant turning point in the development of aviation.

About the Artist:  Elbridge Ayer Burbank was born in Harvard, Illinois on August 10, 1858 and died in a tragic cable car accident in San Francisco on March 21, 1949.  Burbank was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago and continued his art studies in Munich, where he was colleagues with Joseph Henry Sharp and William Robinson Leigh. Upon his return to the United States, Burbank became a successful painter in Chicago where he won the prestigious Charles T. Yerkes art prize.

In 1897, Elbridge Ayer Burbank received an important commission from his uncle, Edward Ayer, the first president of the Field Museum in Chicago and owner of one of the most complete libraries on Native American culture. Ayer hired Burbank to paint portraits of prominent Native Americans. In watercolor, oil and crayon, he painted more than 1200 portraits of Native Americans from 125 tribes. He is believed to be the only person to paint the war chief Geronimo from life. The collection of paintings from these travels is in the Newberry Library in Chicago, and another large group of his paintings is housed at the Smithsonian Institution.

Burbank would spend the rest of his life in the West. From 1900, he traveled constantly, dividing his time between California, Arizona, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Burbank moved to San Francisco in 1917 and worked as an illustrator for the San Francisco Chronicle. His richly illustrated autobiography, Burbank Among the Indian as told to Ernest Royce was published in 1944.

Burbank was also known for his pencil portrait sketches of famous people including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Cesar Romero, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Sonja Henie.