Kenyon Cox (October 27, 1856 – March 17, 1919) was an American painter, illustrator, muralist, writer, and teacher.

Cox enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts hoping to receive better instruction and eventually secure for himself a way to study in Europe.

[2] In 1877 Cox moved to Paris like many American artists of the day to be a part of what he believed to be a sort of second renaissance in art.

Cox designed the League's logo that reads Nulla Dies Sine Linea or No Day Without a Line.

In his mature work, however, Kenyon Cox sought for classic dignity; I remember a picture of his, called "The Flight of the Ideal," that seemed to me a symbol of his aspirations.

Kenyon Cox painted in the realistic manner and earned a reputation for landscapes, portraits and genre studies.

His idealized nudes and traditional treatment of classical themes had little in common with the popular avant-garde art of the day.

[2] Later, in 1912, Cox wrote an article for The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin called "Two Ways of Painting".

In the article he tells of the prejudice he felt as a more traditional figurative artist: The pressure to conformity is upon the other side and it is the older methods that need justification and explanation.

[7] Cox, adamantly loyal to the preservation of the "older methods", set himself in opposition to modern styles.

Kenyon Cox began to focus more on mural painting after the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Kenyon Cox also began to write more articles and became an art critic for numerous magazines in New York including The Nation, Century and Scribner's.

In the summer of 1883 Cox began to write poetry for the public: She lived in Florence centuries ago, That lady smiling there.

This poem was a big success in New York City art circles and earned Cox a great deal of attention.

According to Wayne H. Morgan who wrote the book, Kenyon Cox : a Life in American Art 1856-1919, "The poem and its Unknown Lady symbolized the need among artists, especially those with classical interests, for intense emotion expressed through acceptable forms, and for the idealization of women."

In 1895 Cox published another poem, "The Gospel of Art", that summarized his idealism about the artist's role in the intensifying emotion through sacrifice, and on the function of art in culture: Work thou for pleasure; paint or sing or carve The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.

One of his female students, Louise Howland King from San Francisco, caught Cox's eye and they began to correspond outside of class.

The pair executed the murals that decorated the Liberal Arts Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

A significant body of Cox's personal and professional papers, including extensive correspondence, is held in the Department of Drawings & Archives at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University in New York City.