Tom Calloway Lea III was a painter, muralist, illustrator, and author best known for his depictions of the El Paso, Texas, region and his World War II illustrations which appeared in magazine.

Lea was born July 11, 1907, in El Paso to Tom Lea Jr., and Zola May Utt Lea. Tom Lea Jr., was a renowned criminal lawyer and the mayor of El Paso from 1915 to 1917. As mayor, he had Pancho Villa’s wife and brother jailed for gunrunning, which prompted Villa to threaten to kill the mayor and kidnap his sons. As a result, Tom and his brother Joe had a police bodyguard assigned to them for several months.

After graduating from high school in 1924, Lea attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1924 to 1926, studying under muralist John Warner Norton. Lea left the Institute to apprentice with Norton and work as a commercial artist in Chicago. In 1927, he married fellow art student Nancy Jane Taylor. The couple traveled to Europe in 1930, studying masters like Eugene Delacroix in Paris and Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli in Italy. Upon returning to Chicago, Lea continued work as an assistant to Norton until 1933, when he and Nancy moved to just south of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Lea worked on WPA mural commissions for the New Mexico State University Branson Library and the Las Cruces Branigan Cultural Center. He also had a part time job at New Mexico’s Laboratory of Anthropology and did occasional work for .

After Nancy’s death in 1936, due to complications from an appendectomy, Lea returned to El Paso where he continued his work as a muralist. In 1937, he became acquainted with El Paso printer Carl Hertzog. Their meeting renewed Hertzog’s interest in fine book design, and the two men began a twenty-five year collaboration that would produce several books. That same year, Lea also met J. Frank Dobie, a friend of his father, who had just completed his manuscript for . Dobie was so impressed with Lea’s work, he persuaded his publisher, Little, Brown & Company, to engage Lea as the illustrator--starting Lea’s career as an illustrator. After completing the illustrations for in 1938, Lea began work on his mural for the El Paso Federal Courthouse. During this time he met and married Sarah Catherine Dighton Beane from Illinois.

In the summer of 1940, Lea accompanied Dobie on a trip through the south Texas brush country as part of the preparation for Dobie’s book for which Lea provided the illustrations. That fall, magazine editor Dan Longwell invited Lea to take an assignment as an accredited war artist-correspondent documenting troop training at military bases across the country. He accepted the position and was subsequently assigned to cover the naval patrols in the North Atlantic. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lea became one of eight artists selected by the U.S. Navy to document the war in paintings, which were then published in . As a war artist, Lea spent part of each year making sketches on the battlefields before returning to the U.S. to produce the oil paintings. He was present at most of the areas in the South Pacific where major conflict occurred. Lea spent 64 days on the USS Hornet and left three days before the ship was sunk by Japanese bombers. He accompanied the men of the 1st Marine Division onto the beach at Peleliu Island, where he witnessed the first 32 hours of the assault. Lea’s narrative and sketches of this event were published by Hertzog in 1945 as .

After his return from the war, Lea began painting a portrait of his wife, . He spent the next two years recreating on canvas the image of her from a snapshot that he had carried in his wallet during the war. He considered this painting to be his masterpiece.

magazine offered Lea an assignment to research and illustrate the history of the beef cattle industry in the Western Hemisphere. While working on this assignment in Mexico, Lea became interested in the breeding of fighting bulls. As a result, he wrote and illustrated his first novel, (1949), which made the Best Seller list and was made into a movie starring Mel Ferrer. Lea’s second novel, (1952), also made the Best Seller list and was turned into a movie starring Robert Mitchum. Lea made a cameo appearance in as a barber giving Mitchum a shave.

In the early 1950s, Lea was asked by the Klebergs of the King Ranch to write a history of the Ranch. He spent five years working on a two-volume history, , which was published in 1957.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Lea shifted away from mural work and graphic illustration to easel painting. He produced several paintings interpreting the history of the far West Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico region until he stopped painting in 1998 due to his deteriorating vision. His landscape painting hung in President George W. Bush’s Oval Office.

Tom Lea died January 29, 2001, in El Paso.