Olin Herman Travis was born on November 15, 1888, in Dallas, Tx.  He was the second of six children born to father Olin Few Travis and mother Eulalia Moncrief Travis.  His father was a printer by profession from a distinguished Southern Family, related to William Barrett Travis, commander of the Alamo.



Olin H. Travis showed signs of his gifts early and was encouraged to follow his artistic talents and passion.  After graduating from Bryan High School in Dallas in 1906, he went on to graduate from the Metropolitan Business School in Dallas in 1908, after which he briefly studied under Max Hagendorn.

In 1909, he left his home in Texas to attend and study at The Chicago Art Institute, where he continued his education under various renowned instructors, including Charles Brown, Ralph Clarkson, Kenyon Cox, and Sorolla y Bastida.  Travis graduated with honors in 1914.  He then stayed on to teach at the institution himself before taking a position as director at the Chicago Commercial Art School.  It was also in his time in Chicago that he met his first wife, Kathryne Bess Hail. The Travises had two children together and worked for a number of years in Chicago before relocating to Dallas in 1924.  There, they established the Dallas Art Institute with James Waddell, the first major art school in the South to offer instruction in different fields.  Travis was an instructor and served as director there until 1941.

In 1927, the Travis Ozark Summer Art School was established near Cass, Arkansas, close to Ozark, where Kathryne Hail Travis had grown up and began her life as an artist.  The school was an affiliation of the Dallas Art Institute and was held each summer for a number of years.  Olin believed and taught his students the importance of study from the model in the open air with the indoor work of the studio as an essential factor in the painter’s work.

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Travis had been making his annual sketching trips every summer from 1914 to 1935.  During one such trip is when he first met Everett Spruce in 1925, who lived in Crawford County, Arkansas.  Travis immediately recognized Everett’s talent and potential and after a year of private instruction, Spruce accepted Travis’ offer of a full room and board scholarship at the Dallas Art Institute.  Everett then moved to Dallas to study with Travis before eventually emerging as another major American artist. 

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In 1934, Olin and Kathryne divorced.  Travis then met and wed Josephine Oliver, an accomplished artist and violinist herself who had trained for a number of years as the protege of Frank Reaugh, starting at the young age of 15.  She played violin with the Dallas Symphony for nearly all her life.

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In 1935, a fire in Travis’s summer home in Arkansas destroyed many of his papers and earlier works.

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The majority of Travis’s works were exhibited extensively in the Dallas-Fort Worth area for forty years, starting back in 1914.  He also exhibited in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago.  He won many awards during this time, and many of his shows were one man shows of his work, one of which was a retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1953.  Travis was one of only 10 Dallas artists invited to exhibit in the Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco in 1938.

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Olin H. Travis excelled in many forms of art, most celebrated for his extraordinary work in landscapes and portraitures, but he also was known for an entirely different genre of visionary and symbolic pieces.  His ability to negotiate not only the subtleties of light and form, but also to subconsciously draw his audience’s eye to his focal point and exactly what he wanted to emphasize remains on his most gifted talents as an artist.

Travis’ works have been exhibited for decades in many of America’s foremost museums. He was a founding member of the Southern States Art League and helped to establish the Federation of Artists in Dallas in 1946.

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Olin H. Travis lived with and remained an active artist alongside Josephine Oliver Travis until his death on December 4, 1975.