DON TROIANI is a traditional academic realist painter well known for his extremely accurate historical and military paintings mostly of the Civil War and American Revolution. He was born in New York City in 1949 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy Of Fine Arts and New York City's Art Student’’s League between 1967 and 1971. Don Troiani's lifelong focus on America's military heritage enabled him to present that subject with extremely high fidelity. He has one of the great private artifact study collections of Civil War, War of 1812, Revolutionary War, and World War II uniforms, equipage, insignia and weapons which he calls on to add the unique dimension of realism he is well known for. He is also an expert researcher with a huge personal military library of over 3,000 volumes. The garb and gear of each figure are painstakingly researched. Appropriate backgrounds are found and studied, sometimes sending the artist hundreds of miles from home to examine battlefields and structures firsthand. Because of the great amount of research that goes into one of his works, it is often years between a painting's conception and the actual moment the brush is put to canvas.