John George Collias (June 12, 1918 – March 29, 2017) was a Western American painter, illustrator, and commercial artist. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he lived and worked in Boise, Idaho, since the early 1940s and contributed work to the Idaho Statesman, Boise Weekly, Life Magazine, the Gowen Field Beacon, the Allen Noble Boise State Athletic Hall of Fame, the College of Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame, and to the books Sawtooth Tales by Dick D'Easum and John Collias: Round About the Boise Valley. Collias' prolific work spans a number of genres including portraiture, landscape art, wartime military posters, ad and billboard art. He was perhaps best known regionally as the artist behind "A Portrait of A Distinguished Citizen," a weekly portrait feature that ran in the Idaho Statesman from 1963 to 1993. Military artwork After enlisting in the army, Collias arrived in Boise in 1942 by train from his childhood home of Fort Wayne, IN, to be assigned to the Army Air Corps base at Gowen Field. While stationed at Gowen Field, he and his brother Nick began a regular portrait feature in the base newspaper the Gowen Field Beacon titled soldier of the week. The two also penned cartoons and propaganda posters in support of the war effort. One of John Collias’ posters, featuring a bomber pilot admonishing other pilots to "KNOW YOUR AIRCRAFT," was put into production by the army and posted in all Army Air Corps bases during 1943. Collias was stationed in England at the end of the war, at which time he had the opportunity to witness the iconic moment when many works by old masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn were returned to the walls at the National Gallery of Art in London. "Round About the Boise Valley" After the war, Collias attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, a prominent commercial art school of the time, in the hopes of finding work making movie posters or TV storyboards. After he graduated, he moved instead back to Boise with his wife Lily, a Boise native, and began working as an illustrator at the local daily the Idaho Statesman. Then-Idaho Statesman publisher Margaret Cobb-Ailshie gave Collias a half-page of space in each Saturday evening edition of the newspaper and an assignment to create a serial feature that echoed the format of Ripley’s Believe It or Not but took as its subject Boise and