Peter Corbin

Painter Peter Corbin has been named Bonefish & Tarpon Trust’s 2025 Artist of the Year. His painting, A Chance for Permit, will be available in Copley’s Winter Sale 2025, held in February, with a portion of the proceeds benefitting BTT. Each year since 2011, Copley Fine Art Auctions has sold a new work by BTT’s Artist of the Year in support of the organization.

“I acquired my first Peter Corbin painting at the Copley Auction about six years ago,” said Bill Legg, who chairs the Artist of the Year Selection Committee. “It caught my attention because it was not the usual guide and angler, but a father and his child. Peter told me that it was a commission from a man depicting him instructing his son while wading a flat. The interesting sidenote is that the model for the boy was Peter’s son.”

“I have greatly enjoyed Peter’s work and was thrilled when he agreed to be this year’s Artist of the Year,” Legg went on to say. “The subject, permit fishing, is particularly appealing because we have all seen them approaching with baited breath only to have our hopes dashed. As Steve Huff says, ‘Permit are not honest fish’.”

Corbin is primarily known for sporting art landscapes, merging the natural wonders and elegant drama of the sporting life with the realm of fine art. His vivid sporting art scenes convey a sense of place, mood, and atmosphere in the light reflected off the water or the transmitted light through the clouds or trees revealing influences of the Hudson River School.

“I have been fortunate to be able to combine my love for painting light with my passion for fly fishing and shot gunning,” said Corbin. “Recording my subjects’ experiences in their favorite sport and the places they cherish is the essence of sporting art.”

Corbin studied both painting and sculpture at Pomfret School, Wesleyan University where he received a B.A. with High Honors in Art, and the California College of Arts and Crafts. His greatest influences have been A.B. Frost, Ogden Pleissner and Winslow Homer. He grew up in a home filled with fly rods, shotguns, Labrador Retrievers and the sporting art of A.B. Frost. Using his experiences as a lifelong angler and hunter he has traveled from The American West, British Columbia, South America, Europe, New Zealand and Africa recording portrait commissions for his clients’ love of the outdoors and places they cherish.

His paintings are on public display at the American Museum of Fly Fishing, the National Art Museum of Sport, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, the Catskill Fly Fishing Center & Museum, and many other venues. His one-man exhibitions have appeared at The National Sporting Library & Museum, the Cascapedia River Museum, The Leash, The University Club, The Union League Club, and elsewhere. Corbin’s work is the subject of two films, Line Dance – The Art of Fly Fishing by Peter Corbin and The Sporting Art of Peter Corbin. His work has also appeared in numerous books, including Three Rivers – One Artist’s View, An Artist’s Creel, and The Bonefish, and many publications, including Garden & Gun, Field & Stream, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Sporting Classics.