Samuel Loren Schmucker was born on February 20, 1879 in Reading, Berks County, Pennsylvania and died unexpectedly of heart failure on September 4, 1921, at Southold, Long Island. His one great passion was art and his right (dominant) arm had been crippled from polio in childhood. He enrolled at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in drawing from 1896-97, and still life painting from 1898-99. He then studied at the Howard Pyle Institute at Drexel from 1899-1900. Schmucker's classmates and associates included such well-known and successful American artists as Maxfield Parrish (see note below), Jessie Willcox Smith, N. C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, and Stanley Arthurs, among others.

Eighty-eight original Schmucker watercolor paintings were discovered in Montana and Utah in 1995-96. These paintings were submitted to the Detroit Publishing Company, c.1905-06. Olde America Antiques has published limited edition sets of postcards and a book on the lost artwork of Samuel L. Schmucker.

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