George Hand Wright, painter, etcher, and illustrator, was born in Fox Chase, Pennsylvania on 6 August 1872. His father was a blacksmith which accounts for his fondness of rural scenes. Wright studied at the Spring Garden Institute, a private technical college in Philadelphia, where he was apprenticed to a lithographer. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he studied under Robert Vonnoh and his classmates included Robert Henri, John Sloan, and William Glackens.

Early in his career, Wright worked in New York City as an illustrator for The Century Magazine, Scribner’s, Harper’s Monthly Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Inland Printer. He also created several posters for World War I, commissioned by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and he illustrated Norse Stories Retold from the Edda by Hamilton Wright Mabie. In 1908, Wright and his wife Anne bought a house and thirty acres of land in Westport, Connecticut.

Wright became an Associate Member of the National Academy in 1935 and was elected to full Academician in 1939. He was also a member of the Society of American Etchers, the Westport Artists, the Salmagundi Club, the Dutch Treat Club, and a member and past president of the Society of Illustrators. In 1947, Wright help establish the Westport Artists Club and he is considered by many to be the founder of the Westport Artists Colony.

The work of George Hand Wright is represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

George Hand Post died in Westport, Connecticut on 14 March 1951.