Kenyon Cox was an American painter, illustrator, muralist, writer, and teacher. Cox was an influential and important early instructor at the Art Students League of New York. He was the designer of the League's logo, whose motto is Nulla Dies Sine Linea or No Day Without a Line.
He was born in Warren, Ohio, the son of Jacob Dolson Cox and Helen Finney Cox. As a young adult, Cox studied art at Cincinnati's Art Academy of Cincinnati (formerly known as the McMicken School of Art), but soon became aware of the lack of opportunity and artistic presence in Cincinnati. After visiting the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Kenyon decided that Philadelphia and the art academy there had much more to offer him than Cincinnati did. Kenyon enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts hoping to receive better instruction and eventually secure for himself a way to study in Europe.
In 1877 Cox moved to Paris like many American artists of the day to be a part of what he believed to be a sort of second renaissance in art. There he studied under Carolus-Duran and Jean-Léon Gérôme and then under Alexandre Cabanel at the École des Beaux-Arts. Cox wrote of his initial impression of Paris saying that there was "so much artistic material here that one might almost be content to stay here and paint for years…One can't dive down a crooked street or turn a sharp corner without finding more to paint than he could by hunting months for a subject in America. If Paris is at all like this it must indeed be a paradise for artists."
Cox first studied under Carolus-Duran. Soon after, Cox began to get irritated with Duran. During the winter of 1877-78 Cox wrote to his father about Duran stating that, "I appreciate his strong color, breadth, etc., etc. But I thought you would like to know just how he impressed me, and I must say that a predominating vulgarity grates on me."
Soon after writing this, Cox left the instruction of Carolus-Duran and enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts. His painting teachers at the school included Jean-Léon Gérôme, Alexandre Cabanel and Henri Lehmann.
While in Europe, Cox took the opportunity to travel throughout France and Italy and see the works of the Renaissance Masters. Later he wrote of his travels saying, "The trip, I think, did more to broaden and define my notions of art than anything that ever happened to me before."
In 1882 Cox left Paris and moved to New York where he continued to paint. He also began to do many illustrations, mostly to pay the bills. Kenyon became well established as a magazine illustrator. His illustrations reached a much wider audience than did his paintings.
Cox also began to write art criticisms (unsigned) for the New York Evening Post. This and other writing jobs took Kenyon's time away from painting but also helped him make a living.
Cox continued to live and work in New York for most of his life. He became an influential and important teacher at the Art Students League of New York. Cox designed the League's logo that reads Nulla Dies Sine Linea or No Day Without a Line. In 1900 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician, and became a full Academician in 1903.
Cox was one of the founders and the secretary of the National Free Arts League, and was a member of the Society of American Artists, the National Academy of Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as President of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1915 to 1919.
The artist, Jerome Myers, had studied with Cox during his early years of training at the Art Student's League. Though Myers later took a very different path in his own artistic work, he clearly recalled this teacher in his 1940 autobiography, "Artist In Manhattan." written by the painter-writer Jerome Myers
Kenyon Cox belongs eminently to the traditions of my student days. At his art lectures I remember his eulogies of Michelangelo. Once he remarked that the master slept with his boots on–-which sounds so much more imposing than to sleep with one's shoes on, as I have done. In our life classroom at the old Art Students League, there was a study by Kenyon Cox of a nude girl with red hair, a magnificent example, in oils, of vital life in the raw, an unforgettable canvas. It had a hole in it when I last saw it, and I do not know what became of it.
In his mature work, however, Kenyon Cox sought for classic dignity; I remember a picture of his, called "The Flight of the Ideal," that seemed to me a symbol of his aspirations. For myself, on the contrary, it was the earth that was attractive, the depicting of humans of my choice. Yet my study of the antique at art school made me sympathetic to this earnest devotee of classicism.
Cox's art was very different from the cubist, neo-impressionist, fauvist, expressionist and modernist styles that emerged during his lifetime. He advocated careful drawing and modulated color, and he frequently used allegory and symbolism to present his ideas. Kenyon Cox painted in the realistic manner and earned a reputation for landscapes, portraits and genre studies. His idealized nudes and traditional treatment of classical themes had little in common with the popular avant-garde art of the day. Later, in 1912, Cox wrote an article for The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin called "Two Ways of Painting". In this article he describes the difference between the figurative art he was making and the more fashionable abstract art or representational art. In the article he tells of the prejudice he felt as a more traditional figurative artist:

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