William Baptiste Baird was born in Chicago in 1867 and then went to Paris to complete his training. In 1872 he exhibited at the official Paris Salon, then did so again in 1899, after it had become the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français (in 1881).

He worked in France (in Paris and the forest of Fontainebleau), and in Switzerland. Besides a few landscapes of Paris, Barbizon, Brittany and Lake Geneva, he mostly painted cattle in meadows, and particularly farming and farmyard subjects such as hens, chicks and rabbits.