Carl Oscar Borg was a Swedish-American painter born into a poor family in 1879. He went to California in 1903, where he stayed until 1938. Borg returned to Sweden during the Second World War. After the war he went back to the States again, where he died in 1947.

He was a house painter for some time but wanted to be a real artist. Borg was talented, and was befriended by a gallery owner in Los Angeles, who showed his works. Borg was lucky, when Phoebe Hearst, the mother of the publisher Randolph Hearst, became his patron. She bought several of his paintings, and commissioned him to paint the ceremonials of the Southwest Indian for the University of California. Nowadays, Borg is represented in museums and private collections in the States.