Forsythe was born in the then little town of Orange, California; as early as the year of his birth, his father went on a surveying trip into the desert east of the San Gorgonio Pass. He spent part of his youth on a ranch in the Coachella Valley. Forsythe confided to Ed Ainsworth his feeling regarding a childhood trip to the desert near Antelope Valley: “That trip was what got the me into the desert and the desert into me.”¹ He tried to capture the canyons, stream and trees in his drawings.

Back in L.A., he became a pupil of Louise Garden MacLeod at the Los Angeles School of Art & Design.

In October, 1904, he boarded a train bound for New York, from California, to attend the Art Students’ League. Nostalgia for the desert set in while crossing the Mojave, and he painted his first western (desert) landscape while on the train; he kept that painting, finally framing it 50 years later.

On the East Coast, he developed a successful career as a newspaper illustrator. During World War I, he created the famous poster of an American doughboy, disheveled and tired but victorious, entitled: “And They Thought We Couldn’t Fight.”

In 1920, at the peak of his career as a cartoonist, he returned to California to paint the desert. Many consider Forsythe, Jimmy Swinnerton, and Maynard Dixon to be the first of the desert painters.

Ed Ainsworth called Forsythe: “The Man Who Dipped his Brushes in the Sky”¹

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¹Ainsworth, Ed. Painters of the Desert