Cecil Crosley Bell (1906–1970) was born in Seattle, Washington, and studied printmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in 1930, where he studied under John Sloan, Harry Wickey, Charles Locke, and Will Barnet at the Art Students League. Known to friends as “Spike,” Bell worked as a freelance illustrator — including a long-running relationship with the Donut Corporation of America from 1935 until 1968 — while building a parallel career as a printmaker and painter of American city scenes and everyday life, later turning to landscapes of rural Vermont and the New Jersey coast. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Gallery of Art. Bell died in Rutland, Vermont, in 1970.