Sargent Henry Casselli Jr. lived an incredible life. 

Casselli captured moments that would go on to haunt American society, like the Vietnam War. Casselli was a fresh-faced youngin’ when he was sent to Vietnam, and the youngest artist employed by the Marine Corps to portray combat.At the age of twenty-one, he went from art school to the front lines. He produced an astonishing 680 paintings and sketches by the time of his discharge. There was no doubt that the Vietnam war had a huge impact on Casselli’s art practice: “I showed the emotion that existed between guys. I learned how to cry out there, how to hurt… how to express feelings.” In his drawings he was able to evoke the “hell and the unspeakable horrors of Vietnam.”

Life after the war was thankfully filled with more glitz and glamour than dirt and blood. Casselli went on to paint other important historical moments, along with American icons. He was invited to be an official artist to NASA and was tasked with recording the first Space Shuttle launch in 1980, and again painted spaceman and Senator John Glenn in 1998 on his historic final mission. He painted legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, and even was commissioned for the official portrait of President Ronald Regan; both portraits now hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

It wasn't only famous men who inspired Casselli, though. Growing up in the racially and ethnically diverse Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Casselli also went on to paint sympathetic portraits of African Americans after returning home from Vietnam. He embraced watercolor as his medium, and it was his portrait of an African American man at work, titled Echo for the sound his footsteps would have made in the empty cotton warehouse, that won him a gold medal from the American Watercolor Society. 

Like Edgar Degas before him, Casselli would become interested in drawing the art of ballet, working backstage at a local dance company to capture the ballerinas in action in the 1970s. This interest would be renewed later in life, when his daughters took up the practice.