"I wanted to live there and associate with the 'Taos Greats.'" — Charles Reynolds
Charles Henry Reynolds was born in Kiowa, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in 1902 and died in 1963. He attended the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa, where he met his wife, Ruth Weaver. Before turning fully to art, Reynolds built a career in business, working as an accountant for Skelly Oil Company — eventually rising to chief clerk to the company's Treasurer — and later serving as secretary and treasurer of an engineering firm.
Reynolds began painting in 1925 and was largely self-taught, supplementing his practice with brief study at the Art Institute of Chicago and with John Eliot Jenkins of the Académie Julian. He drew inspiration from the founding Taos painters, particularly Oscar E. Berninghaus and Joseph Henry Sharp, and worked primarily in oil and watercolor with a confident realist sensibility. The Reynolds family first discovered Taos in 1932, and after fourteen years of summering there, they moved permanently in 1946. He helped form the Taos Artists Association, opened a successful gallery in Taos, and exhibited extensively across the Southwest, with one-person shows at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, the Oakland Art Museum, the Louisiana State Museum, the Oklahoma Art Center, and the Harwood Library in Taos. His work is held in collections including the Gilcrease Foundation, the Koshare Indian Museum in La Junta, Colorado, the State Art Collection of Oklahoma, and the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico.