A restless, adventurous and solitary person, Theodore Lambert is considered one of Alaska's most dedicated painters and is especially valued for the integrity of his realism and understanding of the wild frontier aspects of the region. He was born in Zion, Illinois.  At age fourteen he left home with a friend and ended up in Denver, Colorado. He returned home and worked briefly as a sign painter and engraver and then, by age seventeen, left permanently.

Penniless, he arrived in Alaska in 1925 or 1926 and took jobs as a miner, dog-sled postman, trapper, logger and book designer. Then he took a job with the Fairbanks Exploration Company as a roving artist and made enough money from this work to study at the American Academy of Art in Chicago in 1931. He later studied during one winter with Eustace Ziegler in Seattle.

He moved to a cabin on the west coast of Alaska. In 1960 he disappeared mysteriously and left a 250,000 word manuscript and a stack of unfinished paintings. No trace of him was found.

*This is an edited smaller version of Lambert's Biography from AskART: