Fred Maxwell was born in Denmark and spent part of his youth in the care of an English sea captain and his wife–sailing around the world, eventually becoming a merchant seaman. Maxwell arrived in San Francisco in 1890 and traveled over the west, prospecting and painting landscapes. He settled in Yerington, Nevada, in 1912 and entrusted a number of his paintings to the Nevada Historical Society. He disappeared in the central Nevada desert in 1932; a prospector named "Burro" Smith discovered his body four years later.
 

In 1944, Thelma Davis Calhoun (1913-1998) and her husband, James W. Calhoun (1903-1993), drove from the couple's home in Seattle, Washington, to Virginia City, Nevada. Thelma often said their relocation to the Comstock was literally determined "by the toss of a coin." One year later, the Calhouns settled in Carson City–James would become the director of the Nevada State Museum in 1951, and Thelma would be recognized as one of the foremost painters in northern Nevada.

Sybil Rinehart Huntington epitomized the spirit of the Nevada outback artist. Beginning in the 1930s, she lived with her surveyor husband in Sawtooth Knob, a remote mining camp fifty miles west of Winnemucca, Nevada, and created colorful oil paintings of vistas in Humboldt County. Huntington was often featured in solo and group exhibitions in Reno.

English-born Robert G. Schofield (1838-1915) regularly placed advertisements in the Pioche Record that touted his skills as a watchmaker, jeweler, engraver, housepainter, and signmaker. In addition, there was a constant thread throughout Schofield's life—his love of art, mostly expressed in watercolor paintings that painstakingly recorded vistas and mining camps along the eastern flank of Nevada.