Louis Rhead

A talented artist, Louis Rhead came to America in 1883 from Etruiria, Staffordshire England. Although Rhead was widely known for his professional accomplishments in the surrounding NYC art world of the early 1900’s, including his contributions to a series of juvenile classics (Swiss Family Robinson, Gulliver, Grimm, Anderson and others) Rhead is most admired by anglers for contributions to Fly Fishing literature. Given Rhead’s obvious artistic passions, he could not have selected a more apt subject for his first book, The Speckled Brook Trout, published in 1902 by R.H. Russell in New York. In the volume, he marveled that the fish was “the most beautiful of our fresh water fauna, the more so from its mantle of rose and violet which it wears”. Above all of Rhead’s contributions that he made to the sport of fly fishing, through his staggering number of written pieces largely focused on Catskill waters- (including several books and dozens of magazine articles); one cannot deny that he was the first to help sever the American fly fisher’s dependence on British fly fishing entomological works. His American Trout Stream Insects will likely remain a cherished work in the history of American fly fishing.