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Sweden-born Birger Sandzen came to Kansas in 1894 to assume a teaching position at Bethany College in Lindsborg. Sandzen taught languages, fencing, and painting at Bethany, and became the chairman of the art department in 1899. At a friend's request, Sandzen executed his first print in 1916, a landscape in the woodcut technique. Subsequently Sandzen became an avid printmaker, returning repeatedly to Colorado and the Flint Hills of central Kansas to sketch and paint the fleeting effects of light on the landscape. His print Dream Lake won a bronze medal at the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1926.