Frank Sauerwein was a respected painter of western landscapes, Indian portraits, Indian genre scenes, and California missions. His promising career was cut short by his death of tuberculosis at age thirty-nine.

The son of European-trained artist, Charles D. Sauerwein, Frank took his first art lessons from his father before studying at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and, finally, the Philadephia Museum School of Art. In 1891 he moved to Denver in hope of improving his health.

In 1893, Sauerwein accompanied the artist Charles Craig on a trip to the Ute reservation in southwestern Colorado. This began Sauerwein's unyielding fascination with the Southwest and its Native inhabitants. After a trip to Europe, he returned to the American West, visiting Taos in 1899 and Santa Fe in 1900.

Sauerwein returned to Europe in 1905 and exhibited paintings from this trip in Los Angeles the next year. He also exhibited European and Southwestern paintings in San Francisco and Kansas City.