Franklin Boggs was born in 1914 in Warsaw, Indiana. He received his art education at the Fort Wayne Art School and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was awarded two European Traveling Fellowships and was in Europe at the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Boggs began his art career by recording the activities of the Tennessee Valley Authority and painting murals for the U.S. Post Office. He became a war artist-correspondent for Abbott Laboratories early in 1944 and documented the work of the Army Medical Department in the South Pacific. After the war, Boggs was commissioned to paint in South America and became a full professor and artist-in-residence at Beloit College, where he continued his work as a muralist. His works have been exhibited in many leading U.S. museums, including the Metropolitan Corcoran, the Legion of Honor, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His murals are in eight states and two are in Finland. He died in 2009.

The 1998 PBS documentary “They Drew Fire” featured him as one of World War II’s last living combat artists who served as war correspondents, documenting what they witnessed with paints and brushes in the South Pacific. Many of his paintings from the period remain in the Pentagon’s permanent collection.