William Victor Higgins was an American painter and teacher, born in Shelbyville, Indiana. At the age of fifteen, he moved to Chicago, where he studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In Paris he was a pupil of Robert Henri, René Menard and Lucien Simon, and when he was in Munich he studied with Hans von Hayek. He was an associate of the National Academy of Design. Higgins moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1913 and joined the Taos Society of Artists (alongside E. Irving Couse, Joseph Henry Sharp, Oscar E. Berninghaus and others) in 1917. In 1923 he was on the founding board of the Harwood Foundation with Elizabeth (Lucy) Harwood and Bert Phillips.