Cadwallader L. Washburn was born in Minneapolis in 1866. He became deaf at age five due to scarlet fever and spinal meningitis, and attended the Minnesota State Academy of the Deaf until 1884. At Gallaudet College, Washburn, who had originally been interested in entomology and natural science, discovered a love for drawing and decided to study architecture after his graduation in 1890. Washburn went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn architecture and joined the New York Art Students’ League. There, he met art teacher William M. Chase, who took him to Europe with other students. There, Washburn studied under European artists including Joaquín Sorolla and Albert Besnard. Inspired by Besnard’s teaching and the work of American etcher James McNeill Whistler, Washburn bought etching supplies in Paris and went to Italy to work. He produced his first etchings in 1903.

He then traveled to Cuba and Japan, where he and his brother, Stanley, worked as war correspondents during the Russo-Japanese War. In 1907, he returned to America and settled at Norlands, the Washburn family farm in Maine (now a historical museum), where he continued to work on his etchings. By 1910, Washburn was becoming recognized as a well-known artist. He traveled to Mexico, where he was caught up in the Mexican Revolution. He escaped on a ship called the Merida, but the ship was wrecked and Washburn lost many of the prints he had made in Mexico. Over the next few years, he moved from Maine to New Jersey to California. When World War I broke out, he and Stanley became war correspondents again, traveling through Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand before returning to America in 1916. In Arizona he produced many portraits of the local Native Americans, and then returned to Mexico, where he made illustrations of bullfighting.

In 1923 Washburn joined a scientific expedition to the Marquesas Islands, after which Gallaudet gave him an honorary Ph.D. degree. He continued to travel widely over the next several years, including California, the French Riviera, Tunisia, the Canary Islands, and Paris. By 1937, the eyestrain caused by etching forced Washburn to give it up, and he returned to working as an oil painter. He settled back in Maine and married Margaret Ohrt in 1943. Cadwallader Washburn died in 1965 at the age of 99.