The dormant artistic instinct was an inheritance from his father, a Danish wood-carver, who had migrated to this country early in the sixties. He settled in Ogden, Utah, where Solon was born in 1868; but he found no encouragement for his craft and, resolving to become a doctor, turned back to St. Louis, took a degree in medicine, and then established himself in Fremont, Nebraska, where his practice soon extended far into the prairies. He kept many horses, and the son grew up among them, with little inclination for school studies and a keen desire for the open-air life. At first he worked as a cowboy on a ranch of his father’s; later assumed control of a larger one, where for a number of years he lived in that close companionship with men and animals which breeds sympathy as well as knowledge. One of his elder brothers, Gutzon, had already become an artist, and it was a visit that he paid to the ranch in 1890 which first aroused in Solon’s mind a thought of trying to draw. He began to experiment with the pencil, and gradually the fascination of representing form grew upon him, so that sketching occupied all his leisure time with continually increasing grip upon his desire, until by 1893 he made up his mind to sell out his share in the ranch and go forth and study art. First he sought his brother in the Sierra Madre Mountains of California and studied painting with him for a few months; then drifted to Los Angeles, and thence to Santa Anna. In the latter town he rented his first studio at two dollars a month; but it was not long before he found his clothes were getting shabby, and, moreover, the confinement of the four walls was irksome. So he put a sign upon his door, “In Studio Saturdays Only”; and under cover of the dusk started for the wild country of the Saddleback Mountains. All through the week he lived among the old Spanish Indians and Greasers--lawless people who have been left stranded in the march of civilisation--eating with them, sleeping beside them in the thicket, sketching everything he saw. On Friday he started back for the town, and, sleeping on the outskirts, was early astir in the morning and passed unobserved to his little room before the towns-people were awake.