At one time considered by some to be America's preeminent figure painter, Gilbert Gaul was known for his illustrations and paintings of military and western subjects. He attended public school in Newark, New Jersey, before completing his secondary school education at the Claverack Military Academy in upstate New York. Gaul desired a career in the Navy but was refused enlistment because of ill health. He went to New York in 1872 and enrolled in the Academy's antique class, remaining until 1875. He also studied with John George Brown and at the Art Students League. From 1877 until his death, Gaul's work was rarely absent from the Academy's exhibitions.
In 1876 Gaul and a cousin made a trip to the West, sketching and photographing near the Sioux Indians in the Dakotas. Upon his return to New York he began painting the military and western scenes for which he became famous. In 1881, the year after he married Susie A. Murray, Gaul left New York for Van Buren County, Tennessee, where he had inherited a farm. He initially remained only four years but returned there several times over the next three decades.
Gaul made another trip West in 1890, representing the United States Indian Agency. With four other artists, he participated in the census of Native Americans and contributed illustrations and text to the Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed (Washington, D.C., 1894), a document that the art historian Robert Taft has termed "one of the most exhaustive sources of information on the American Indian ever published" (p. 215). A subsequent trip to Central America and the West Indies afforded Gaul another opportunity to publish travel illustrations, this time in Century Magazine, edited by his friend Richard Watson Gilder.
Financial setbacks and a long, losing battle with tuberculosis troubled Gaul's later life. After his wife died in a fall from a window, he remarried in 1898 and moved back to his Tennessee farm several years later. He tried to earn money by teaching in Nashville and elsewhere, but by 1910 he had returned east, settling in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Having built much of his reputation with depictions of the Civil War, Gaul lived long enough to create military paintings on the theme of World War I.
