Robert M. Briggs was born and raised in Colorado. While in high school he worked as a ranger for the Rocky Mountain National Park. At 19, Briggs joined the military and worked as a sharpshooter and communications sergeant during the Second World War. He was stationed primarily in the Pacific Theatre, where he made sketches and watercolors of other servicemen, battleships, local people, and landscapes. Many of his sketches were displayed in the mess hall and at the Officer's Club. Briggs also painted insignias on military planes, including the insignia on Bockscar, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. After returning from the Pacific, Briggs received a master of arts from Stanford University, and later obtained a doctorate of education from the Colorado State College of Education. In 1957, he became a professor of secondary education at San Diego State University where he taught for nearly thirty years, retiring in 1985. Briggs passed away in 2005.